a funny thing happened on the way to carnegie hall

A FUNNY THING
HAPPENED ON THE WAY
TO CARNEGIE HALL
A LIGHT-HEARTED GUIDE TO
MUSICAL EXPERTISE
N
Juliette de Marcellus
ADDCO Publications
ISBN: 978-0-692-01527-8
Copyright 2011 Juliette de Marcellus
www.juliettedemarcellus.com
A Funny Thing Happened
on the way to Carnegie Hall
A Light-hearted Guide to
Musical Expertise
by Juliette de Marcellus
This book is dedicated to Mark Twain, who wrote:
“Good music isn’t as bad as it sounds”,
which sums up what this book is trying to say.
This inspired comment brings us first to:
Part I
Music, Generally Speaking
CHAPTER 1
What is a Symphony, anyway?
1
CHAPTER 2
The Tone Poem 4
CHAPTER 3
Nationalism in Music
7
CHAPTER 4
The Conductor 13
CHAPTER 5
The Music Critic 28
************
Part II
What You Need to Know about The Great Composers
Johann Sebasian Bach
46
George Frederick Handel
55
Franz Joseph Haydn
64
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ludwig van Beethoven
Franz Schubert
99
68
84
The Romantics:
Robert Schumann
103
Felix Mendelssohn
109
Frederic Chopin
Franz Liszt
118
125
Hector Berlioz
132
Johannes Brahms 139
Richard Wagner
146
*************
Part III
What You Need to Know about Other Important Composers
Late German Romantics:
Anton Bruckner
148
Gustav Mahler
149
Richard Strauss
151
************
French Composers and Other Oddities:
Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel
Camille Saint-Saëns
158
Georges Bizet 161
************
152
Russian Music:
Peter Tchaikovsky
163
‘The Five’: Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev, Cui
Igor Stravinsky
169
Serge Prokofiev
173
166
Dmitri Shostakovich 175
Alexander Scriabin
176
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Nicolai Medtner
179
183
***********
East European Twentieth Century Music:
Béla Bartók 184
Kodály, Janácek, Martinů 186
***********
Music in England and America:
Edward Elgar 189
Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Benjamin Britten
Charles Ives, Edward Macdowell, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin,
Nadia Boulanger, Gian Carlo Menotti
************
196
190
Modern Music
205
************
Postscript - Chamber Music!! What is this??
************
Conclusion
213
************
About the Author
216
210
PART 1
Chapter I
What is a Symphony, Anyway?
As they say today – that is a good question.
Most people hope they are right just presuming that a symphony is
a work for a full orchestra. Some would even go so far as to say it is
a piece of music for full orchestra cut up into “movements”, and that
if
you
DARE
clap
between
movements – even though you
had no idea it was not over –
everyone will turn around and
stare at you and perhaps even the
conductor will.
You will be led to believe you
have broken some sacrosanct rule and are a pariah.
Actually none of the above is strictly true because a “symphony”
is only a work in which the first movement is structured in a manner called
‘sonata-form’ and which can be adapted to any size group right down to
one instrument – when it is called a “sonata”.
1
You will sound very distinguished if you talk about “sonata-form”,
so let’s lay it out right away.
It only means that the first movement is written as a drama between
two opposing themes or musical ideas, that they modulate to related keys
in order to add color and structure, fight it out, dramatically or
romantically, and end by reconvening at the end in the same musical scale
(key).
This succeeds in sounding as if a resolution to the drama has been
reached.
That is all it is.
The three other movements are only there to fill out a satisfying
alternation of slow (Adagio), unexpected or slightly amusing movement
(Scherzo), and something zesty to end with.
Originally the composer would have been devastated if people hadn’t
applauded each movement and, besides, in Beethoven’s time they
would not only take a break between movements, or go out to lunch,
they would often have a different piece altogether played between them.
So this outraged staring is only a way in which snobs try to make
good music into a pompous esoteric art that only insiders can understand.
Pay no attention if it happens to you, and stare right back.
(Fortunately this tyranny has not yet been applied to ballet,
where it is quite the reverse: the insiders suddenly burst into applause
at various turns and leaps rather than at others leaving the common
member of the audience wondering what it is they don’t know.)
2
Symphonies, which were invented by Joseph Haydn, grew to immense
proportions in the 19th century. Thus it is wise to read up on the one being
played to know how long you must ask the babysitter to stay. If it is by
Mozart it will be reasonably short – around half an hour; if it is by Mahler,
tell her to bring her overnight things.
Concertos (perhaps we should advise the expert’s Italian pronunciation:
“concerti”) are the half-brothers of symphonies and exactly the same
except a piano, violin, cello or other individual instrument is given a
starring role.
A soloist arrives on stage to create the work together with the orchestra.
For some reason there are vastly more piano concertos than violin
concertos – or any other kind. It is the dream of anyone who has learnt
the piano to play one of these.
Don’t be surprised that there are only three movements in a concerto
instead of the four in a symphony. This is always so (except for Brahms’
Second Piano Concerto), and there is no explanation for it.
The other forms of music that use Haydn’s “Sonata-form” with its
dramatic first movement (which you should learn to call the “Allegro”
movement) and its three other movements are the Quartet, the Trio,
the Quintet, the Octet, etc.
As you can see, these are named by the number of players performing
them (there are also occasional Septets and Nonets – the last not a novice
nun but a sonata-form four-movement work for nine instruments,
as you by now are able to work out for yourself).
3
Chapter 2
Tone Poems
It is important to know when you are listening to a symphony
as opposed to a Tone Poem. A word to the wise here:
Tone Poems describe something or illustrate a set of circumstances.
As an expert it is probably better that you are a bit patronizing about these
as they really are not entirely musically self-sustaining. A Tone Poem
requires you to think about what the music is describing as opposed to a
symphony that is abstract and doesn’t bother to tell you what it is about.
This music is also called Programme Music or Programmatic Music,
as, obviously, it follows a set idea or programme.
A symphony expects that
its
inherent
architecture
and
harmonies describe a dramatic or
spiritual
scenario
that
each
person can understand within his
own experience, understanding
or emotional instincts.
Now that’s a long sentence,
but very important for the expert
to be able to explain.
4
Truthfully, most people who are not musical experts prefer Tone Poems
to symphonies, as they are easy to follow and catch your attention with
their descriptive sounds.
Tone Poems came into vogue gradually with the Romantic Movement
– Liszt was the first to really develop them as a form, but he called them
‘Symphonic Poems’. However even such classical sticklers as Haydn
and Beethoven composed them. In fact, it is probably Beethoven who is
responsible for the name: he said it was his ambition to be ‘a tone-poet’.
Haydn did it with humour, as anyone can hear in The Creation,
when you can hear the little fish being created. And let’s face it, Vivaldi’s
The Four Seasons dates from even earlier than that.
It is all right to enjoy Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony with its sounds
of countryside, shepherds pipes and storms, but the Battle Symphony
composed in honor of Wellington’s defeat of the French army in Spain,
is just dreadful. Later, as we shall see, many were composed by the
Romantic composers, Berlioz, Liszt, the Impressionist French composers,
and a host of others.
If there are some Tone Poems that you like very much, say Borodin’s
In the Steppes of Central Asia; Smetana’s My Country – incorporating
The Moldau, which we will discuss later; or Sibelius’ Swan of Tuonela;
Tchaikovsky’s “Overture-Fantasy” Romeo and Juliet, or even his
1812 Overture – or George Gershwin’s An American in Paris –
it is better to put on a slightly kindly air and say – as if the joke is on you –
that you have to admit that you have a weakness for these works.
Give the impression of being a little apologetic.
5
Tone Poems were usually composed for full orchestra, which is why
you definitely have to know the difference between one of these and
a symphony, but there are many for the piano also, such as
Chopin’s Ballades and many of Liszt’s piano works, such as his
Dante Sonata or St. Francis Preaching to the Birds, and some for violin,
like the aforementioned Four Seasons.
As we will have a great deal to say throughout this little guide book
about Franz Liszt, we should say here that he was largely responsible for
the proliferation of this form of music throughout and during the Romantic
Movement. Unkind people might say that these non-musical ideas were
a crutch he used in composing, which may be a bit true.
He was to be followed by many others, though, but they pose another
problem for the listener. You must be familiar with the literature or legend
or event they are describing and many of these are not only totally
forgotten but the notes in the programme aren’t much help; they don’t
say much more than, for instance: “Saint-Saëns’ Le Rouet d’Omphale
depicts Hercules in servitude to the Lydian Princess.”
I mean, do we know about this?
Then there is: “Balakirev’s Tamara is based on a poem by Lermontov
which depicts an angel-demon-queen who lures men to destruction”.
Well, we’ve seen any number of those, of course, but do we know who
Lermontov is?
We will have much more to say about the Tone Poem in our next
chapter: Nationalism in Music.
6
Chapter 3
Nationalism in Music
You will notice that very often the programme notes at a concert
will tell you that there are “folk elements” used in a symphonic or
concert work. This needs to be explained.
At the opening of the 19th century, or the “eighteen hundreds”,
as Americans usually say today, composers were looking around for
something to give their music a lift when they could not come up with
an abstract theme as good as those that the composers of the previous
century had done.
The
19th
century
was
developing an extremely exalted
idea of Nationalism, and this
gave them what they needed.
This
nationalism,
which
was
confused with patriotism, was to
cause more horrific battles and
more gruesome deaths than any
other idea in the history of Europe.
But the composers of this time
were very sincere in wishing to
immortalize the sounds and glories of their native lands.
7
Chopin set an example few could ever follow.
As we will see in Part II, What You need to Know About the Great
Composers, Chopin was born in Poland, though his father was French.
He grew up listening to the special sounds of Polish folk music, to the
rhythms of the Mazurka and the proud steps of the Polonaise.
All his music is pervaded by these Polish sounds as he was dreadfully
homesick throughout his entire adult life which he spent in Paris and
where he considered himself as living in exile (as if anyone could consider
themselves to be an exile if they lived in Paris).
Brahms, who was German, fell in love with what he thought were
Hungarian dances and wrote them up as extremely successful piano works,
although what he had discovered were really Gypsy melodies. No matter.
Later Franz Liszt (we will meet him everywhere) decided to strike
something of a pose as a Hungarian, although he had never lived there and
couldn’t speak the language. He composed his Hungarian Rhapsodies
for this reason, as well as founding a music
conservatory in Budapest.
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), is known as the
foremost Norwegian composer – although his
family was Scottish – and there are no other
Norwegian composers that one can name right
off. Grieg found that seeking out and including
Norwegian folk songs and dance rhythms
gave his music a charming quality.
8
Grieg lived during a period when the ‘peasant’ was admired, and
writers like Tolstoy aspired to be one. Grieg also wanted to feel one
with the peasants whose music he admired.
One day he decided to wander down to a tavern much frequented by
the local agricultural workers as they were celebrating some kind of
harvest festival. In the tavern they had a large bowl of some kind of ale or
beer that they were handing round.
But when Grieg saw the tobacco spit on the edge of the bowl he just
couldn’t bring himself to share it. He felt he had failed as a would-be
peasant.
Grieg composed his evergreen Piano Concerto in A minor, which
is often described in programme notes as “filled with the sounds of
Spring in Norway”.
This is one of the most popular works in the repertoire, played almost
every season by every orchestra. It has also been featured in a number of
movies about pianists. It is played by every pianist, professional or
student, and for this reason you will hear the established experts refer to
this work as a “war horse”.
Don’t try to dispute this; they will go on saying it and it will go on
being played because it is beautiful.
This work is responsible for Grieg being a familiar name, even among
those who have only heard classical music at the cinema.
Other great composers have also incorporated this kind of thing
in their music.
9
In England, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) really only found
two outstanding themes: Greensleeves, and the Theme from Thomas Tallis,
but he edited the Anglican Hymnal and found some there – but they were
not very spicy.
Vaughan Williams did better with geographical ideas such as
Sea Symphony, the Antarctica Symphony and the London Symphony –
in which he did include some popular feeling – and I suppose we should
include in his geographical category, Toward an Unknown Region.
You must always refer to Vaughan Williams as “Rafe”, not Ralph,
or you will certainly be corrected by someone.
Bedřich Smetana (1824 – 84) put Czech sounds and music on the map.
Smetana was, as is almost needless to say, deeply influenced by Liszt,
because as we go along we will find that practically every musician in the
19th century was helped or influenced by this amazing man.
Although Smetana was primarily interested in composing operas,
he is best known for his symphonic cycle Ma Vlast, which means
“My Country”.
As mentioned earlier, it is from this cycle that his most famous work
is taken – The Moldau.
This is a tone poem par excellence – the musical description of the
river that runs from deep in the Bohemian woods into, and through,
Prague.
This piece has become the unofficial anthem of the Czech Republic.
It is fortunate it is such a beautiful work as one hears it so often.
10
Antonin Dvořák (1841 – 1904), who was also Czech (or ‘Bohemian’,
which sounds more elegant) was outstanding at elaborating on folk music
and became the envy of the world with his first big success, the
Slavonic Dances. He wrote two books of these for four hands,
orchestrated them and became a role model for composers looking for
their musical roots.
All of his work is inspired by his love of native melody and for
that reason there is a big misunderstanding concerning his masterpiece,
the New World Symphony.
He composed this while teaching in New York, at a time during which
he was wretchedly homesick, and filled it with sounds of home, sending it
back to Prague with the message “From the New World.”
However, because he was an outspoken advocate for the use of national
and folk sounds in a composer’s work, and admonished American
composers to do the same, many have heard, and continue to hear in this
symphony, reflections of Negro or American Indian sounds.
It is best not to argue about this.
Later, as we will see, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland would
take his advice and incorporate what passes for indigenous American
sounds in their works, but neither of them were dredging up memories of
their youth in the American countryside as they were both first generation
Jewish New Yorkers whose families were recent immigrants from Europe.
Added to this, Copland got his training from the famous Nadia
Boulanger in Paris (see later chapter).
11
One should mention Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) here. Sibelius made up
for the fact that his country, Finland, is probably less known for bellicose
nationalistic bravado or celebrated battles than any other, which makes it
particularly ironic that his most famous work is Finlandia.
This mighty, glorious blast of patriotism would terrify any potential
enemy into surrendering before a fight.
However, some other composers picked up on folk music for various
reasons, some clearly because they thought it lent a savory quality to their
music and some because it became fashionable to compose as a patriot.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the American pianist (1829-1869), who used
Creole motifs in his piano pieces, was such a one.
As we see, a relationship grew up naturally between Nationalism and
Tone Poem, sometimes quite a subtle one.
Here we should mention the two descriptive works, The Pines of Rome
and The Fountains of Rome by Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936). These two
highly attractive and much performed works stand out as extremely
successful tone poems.
Respighi was a violinist and was no doubt influenced by getting a job
as a musician in the St. Petersburg orchestra where he came under the
influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, whom we shall meet further on.
Respighi’s entire musical thinking was affected by this friendship.
In our segment on French music you will see that, having destroyed
all their own folk music as part of the French Revolution, the French
invented Spanish folk music instead.
12
Chapter 4
Conductors
Before we begin our exploration of the Great Composers in Part II,
it would be as well to explain the character of those fellows who stand
in front of our orchestras, baton in hand.
Conductors are legendary for the size of their egos and the length
of their hair.
As far as their egos are concerned,
although they compare with those of
the music critics, whom we will meet
in Chapter 5, they have more excuse as
they have actually studied music,
but they share a necessity for an
elephantine memory and punctuality.
And in the past, the conductor also
had to have Perfect Pitch.
The question of perfect pitch is a difficult one, as it is somewhat
mysterious. Some people have it and some people don’t. ‘Perfect pitch’,
as opposed to ‘relative’ pitch – or just knowing when something sounds
awful – means that someone can hear the exact sound of a note in their
head when they look at the written note.
13
Or, conversely, they can name the note or write it down when they
hear it. Although this can be encouraged and developed, it must be largely
inherent in the musician.
In the days before recordings, a conductor would pick up the score of a
symphony, comprising seventeen or so lines of instruments on each page,
in a mammoth four movement work, and read it like a book, hearing the
whole thing in their heads. Not only had they to read it like a book,
but they had to decide in their imaginations how the work should flow and
develop, reach its climaxes and layer in the various voices.
No longer.
Today anyone who has allowed their hair to grow too long can buy a
CD of the work, or even several versions recorded by different conductors
leading various orchestras, and – standing in front of a mirror –
practice cueing in the musicians and maintaining the tempi, while listening
to the recording and waving their stick in the air.
So, with the recording industry, perfect pitch became somewhat
redundant. Making things even easier for the conductor of today is the fact
that there are few contemporary composers producing new works that
need to be premiered and for which no recording exists.
Further, those compositions that are produced today are so full of
strange sounds and purposeful dissonance that it wouldn’t matter if the
conductor knew how it was supposed to sound or not.
Nor would he be sure that the second clarinet had got it right or not,
nor, probably, would the second clarinet.
14
To compensate for having a much easier task today than formerly,
the contemporary conductor not only grows his hair too long, but insists
on an exorbitant fee and on being thought of and treated as a celebrity,
if not a minor god. Usually the wives of the symphony’s board will
cooperate with this, but it doesn’t necessarily do anything for the music.
Today, however, and because of all this, it has grown more difficult
for the conductor of a symphony orchestra to prove his authority to
the professional musicians he is directing. The question is always hanging
in the air: who is this fellow who thinks he can tell us how to play this
music? We can count and read the indications for tempo, fast or slow;
and the indications for dynamics, loud or soft or in-between –
so what does he think he can do to make our music any better?”
And, as the eminent French horn player Frank Gorell said in reference
to conductors: “music comes out of every instrument in the orchestra but
one; not one note comes out of that little stick the conductor waves about.”
Despite this, conductors invariably develop a sense of omnipotence.
The stick finally affects their minds. Some become megalomaniacs; some
just take advantage of their power to become scathing wits at the expense
of their musicians and everyone else.
A famous example of this was the English conductor, Sir Thomas
Beecham, who was, in fact, actually funny, unlike many other English
wits, who think being rude is amusing and being insulting really funny.
He rivaled George Bernard Shaw, who we will meet in our chapter on
music critics, for the ability to think up clever insults.
15
We have to give Sir Thomas
credit for one very amusing and
very
true
aphorism:
He
said
in reference to his home audience:
“The English don’t really like music,
but they love the sound it makes.”
It cannot be said better.
In keeping with his disdain for the English audience, he also said:
“There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish
together. The public doesn’t give a damn for what goes on in between.”
Sir Thomas had come up the easy way with a career financed by
his father, whose fortune was made by “Beecham’s Little Liver Pills”,
a very successful product, made necessary by English cooking.
But despite his easy rise, he was a brilliant man who did more than
conduct – which he did exceedingly well for six decades.
He was artistic director of Covent Garden opera seasons, he founded
two major symphony orchestras, the London Philharmonic and the
Royal Philharmonic, and, being a man of means, he often helped fund
them as well.
However, like so many of the twentieth century conductors,
Beecham’s career was complicated by WWII.
Unlike many others Beecham decided to avoid the struggle and went to
direct orchestras and opera in the United States for the duration of the war.
“They said there was an emergency, so I emerged,” he said.
16
He was able to live this down and continue his career in Great Britain
when he returned in 1944, which is quite remarkable in itself, as a number
of British actors who remained in Hollywood during the conflict were
snubbed by the theatre and their audiences in Britain when it was over.
Sir Thomas’ wit spared no one, not even his sponsors.
One summer he was invited to conduct at the Chicago Symphony’s
distinguished Ravinia Festival. This takes place in a suburb of the city and
is very close to a railway station. During the music making, the sounds of
the trains coming and going are often heard.
In his words, “Ravinia is the only railroad station in the world
with its own resident symphony orchestra.”
As a result of his biting tongue and his instinct for self-preservation,
Beecham was not a favorite with his contemporary musicians:
Sir Henry Wood, a distinguished musician and founder of the famous
‘Promenade Concerts’, regarded him as an upstart, although he was
envious of his success. Sir Adrian Boult, another distinguished English
conductor, even thought him “repulsive” as a man, and Sir John Barbirolli
felt he could not be trusted.
Another conducting ‘Sir’ was Malcolm Sargent, who collaborated with
Beecham to found the London Philharmonic, but was nevertheless the
subject of the occasional Beecham barb: he described the up-and-coming
maestro Herbert von Karajan as “a kind of musical Malcolm Sargent.”
Sir Malcolm was a debonair man, always with a carnation in his lapel,
whom Beecham referred to as “Flash Harry”.
17
On one occasion, it was reported that a plane flying over some
mid-East country had been fired upon by desert tribesmen and that among
the passengers was fellow British conductor, Sir Malcolm; Beecham burst
out admiringly: “I didn’t know the Arabs had such refined musical taste.”
Beecham preferred foreign conductors to home grown ones, perhaps
because he couldn’t understand what they said about him, and vice versa.
Beecham was not always on top of his game, however. The story is told
that upon meeting a lady at a reception who seemed somehow familiar
he tried to work out who she could possibly be. Finally the lady remarked
that she had been worrying as “my brother has been rather ill lately.”
“Ah”, he grabbed at this, “your brother! I’m sorry to hear that. And, er,
what is your brother doing at the moment?”
“Well, he’s still the King,” replied the lady, who was Princess Mary,
King George VI’s sister.
Then
there
was
Arturo
Toscanini,
who behaved in the most exemplary way
during the war.
Toscanini’s career leapt from that of
assistant chorus master and cellist in an
Italian touring opera company to conductor
at the age of nineteen in 1886. Floundering
in South America, conductor after conductor
proved unable to conduct Aida, and in desperation the manager finally
listened to the orchestra players, who suggested young Arturo.
18
He had been rehearsing the chorus and at least knew the score.
With no other alternative he was asked to step in to go through with the
performance. He did so entirely from memory and with such success that
he completed the season’s eighteen operas.
Toscanini’s musicianship and astonishing memory caused the
musicians who played for him to forgive him his fierce tantrums,
as well as his discomforting perfect recall of their slightest mistakes after
months and years, as well as his disconcerting habit of humming along
with the performance.
As mentioned above, unlike Beecham, Toscanini behaved admirably
during the war, although like Beecham he left his home and his career
behind. In his case, however, it was not to avoid bombs, but because of
his disgust with Mussolini’s fascist rule in Italy.
This praise cannot be given to a number of German conductors who
stuck with their careers through the Nazi era.
Of composer/conductor Richard Strauss, who tolerated the Nazi
regime, Toscanini said, “To Strauss the composer I take off my hat;
to Strauss the man I put it back on again.”
Toscanini also said “Gentlemen, be democrats in life, but aristocrats
in art.”
He disliked the sentimentalizing and over-romanticizing of great works.
Referring to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, he said, “To some it is
Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle. To me, it is
Allegro con brio.”
19
In 1940, Toscanini visited the West of the United States and while in
California was taken to the MGM set. Leaving the studio, he had tears
in his eyes.
He said of his visit, “I will remember three things all my life –
the sunset, the Grand Canyon and Eleanor Powell’s dancing.”
Like Richard Strauss, the conductor Herbert von Karajan also
compromised with the Nazi party, having joined it as a young man in 1933
in order to get his career moving, and remained a member throughout the
war years.
It was not always considered to his credit that he claimed later that
he only did this to advance his career.
Von Karajan, an Austrian, conducted both the Berlin Philharmonic
and the Vienna. He said, “If I tell the Berliners to step forward, they do it.
If I tell the Viennese to step forward, they do it – but then they ask why.”
He also said, “Those who have achieved all their aims probably
set them too low.” Very true.
Von Karajan was famous for an overwhelming vanity. When recording
the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the great Russians Richter, Oistrakh
and Rostropovich, he refused to retake an important passage because,
he said, “we must leave time for the photographers.”
The amused expressions of the soloists and Karajan’s sense of
self-importance can be seen on the resulting album cover.
No wonder that Isaiah Berlin said that he was a genius with “a whiff of
sulphur about him.”
20
Conducting can have an important influence on health and at times
it can be dangerous. The New York Times once ran an article on the long
lives of orchestra conductors, concluding that the aerobic effects of baton
waving and the gymnastics of conducting technique made them physically
fit and would increase their longevity.
Toscanini’s family made him go to a doctor for a check-up for the very
first time in his life when he turned eighty, and the doctor was amazed:
“You have the heart of a thirty year-old man, maestro; how do you do it?”
Toscanini replied, “I never use it.”
Now, while the salutary effects of conducting may be indisputable,
there are exceptions. Lully, Louis the XIV’s court composer, had an
accident while conducting the royal orchestra. In those days, conductors
kept time with a long stick with which they thumped the floor to keep time
rather like a tall metronome. Somewhat carried away, the Sun King’s
composer missed his aim and brought the thing down on his foot.
Perhaps understandably, he refused the treatment offered by the royal
physician at Versailles, and died. Untreated, his foot developed gangrene.
One was as likely to die of medical treatment as of the complaint in those
days, so either way Lully was doomed.
Another example of the dangers of conducting happened to Joseph
Strauss, younger brother of Johann Strauss, Jr., the so-called ‘Waltz King’.
Joseph was also a composer/conductor and also led waltz orchestras
in the parks and dance halls of Vienna. One evening he stepped backward
and fell off the podium and stage into the orchestra pit. He died from this.
21
All this stress has led to some conductors becoming very superstitious.
The Polish conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Artur Rodźinski,
would never go on stage until he was sure that he had his pistol in the back
pocket. A Carnegie Hall concert was once delayed for forty-five minutes
because he had left his pistol at home. The audience had to wait while
someone went to his home in Westchester to find and rush it back to him.
One explanation for this bizarre behavior was that when Rodźinski
first conducted an orchestra in Europe he was afraid his youth wouldn’t
allow him to command the respect he needed from the older, experienced
musicians; he wanted to be able to threaten them into obedience.
However, Leonard Rose, who was principal cellist under him, said
“Rodźinski was so sure that he was going to make a mess of things at his
debut that he was prepared to blow his brains out if his fears were
realized.”
But perhaps he just wanted to be ready in case he met a critic.
Many of the 20th century conductors had reputations as tyrants.
Toscanini was considered a stern, dictatorial type. Fritz Reiner was
reputed to be the same, noted for his sneering insults to his musicians.
The aforementioned hornist, Frank Gorell, once wrote a brief memoir
about conductors under whom he had played. “Fritz Reiner”, he wrote,
“was a man of many moods, all of them miserable.”
As with Sir Thomas Beecham, private funding also made another
distinguished career possible. Serge Koussevitzky was a determined man
who entered the conservatory in Russia as a double bass player.
22
Koussevitzky’s ambition was to play a more leading role than bottom
line accompaniment in the concert hall and he had the good fortune
to meet and marry a very wealthy woman. She bought him his own
symphony orchestra, known as the Koussevitzky Orchestra, and it soon
became recognized as a very fine ensemble.
Koussevitzky also bought the major Russian music publishing house,
based in Paris, and many major Russian works bear the name
‘Koussevitzky Publishing’ on the title page.
With the reputation he gained leading his orchestra in Paris,
Koussevitzky was soon receiving offers from various cities and in 1924
he accepted the music directorship of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Under his twenty-five year leadership, the Boston Symphony became
one of the finest in America. There will be more about Koussevitzky
later in this guide.
The summer music festival Koussevitzky established for the
Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, was the trend-setter
for a large number of other orchestras’ summer homes.
This has become an important style in the United States with
orchestras taking up summer homes such as Saratoga, New York,
Washington’s National Symphony at Wolf Trap and the Cleveland
Orchestra founded the Blossom Festival.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic has the Hollywood Bowl.
We have already mentioned Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, close to
the railway station.
23
Some of these orchestral residences are in the cities, with New York’s
summer music based at Lewissohn Stadium in the Bronx; later, as the
Mostly Mozart Series, in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall; and the
Philadelphia Orchestra’s Robin Hood Dell outdoor concerts.
Otto Klemperer was a towering talent, but, like Toscanini, a tyrant
on the podium. In his book Gorell gave this version of a story found in
many books on music and musicians as follows: Otto Klemperer arrived
to lead the New York Philharmonic as guest conductor.
Before beginning to rehearse the orchestra in a Beethoven symphony,
he began an explanatory talk about the work. The musicians had played
the work countless times, so they began fidgeting as the talk went on
and on.
Finally, oboist Bruno Labate, a brilliant player and a very short man,
stood up and addressed Klemperer – a towering man physically as well as
artistically.
Looking up at the giant figure on the podium he called out:
“Klemp! You talka too much! You crazy.”
The conductor turned red with fury and stormed off stage. The others
gathered around the little oboist and told him he had to apologize.
At first he resisted, but finally he relented and agreed to make amends.
A committee convinced him to say he was sorry; Klemperer
looked expectantly at Labate, who rose to his feet and cleared his throat.
“Mr Klemp,” he began, “I’m sorry!” The conductor nodded his head
but Labate continued: “I’ma sorry you crazy.”
24
Many of the great conductors of this period were Hungarians.
They included such legendary names as George Szell, Fritz Reiner,
Eugene Ormandy and George Solti. Their common nationality caused
a sign to be prominently displayed in a major Hollywood film studio;
it read: “It is not enough to be Hungarian – one must also be talented!”
Fritz Reiner is remembered for having set the sound for the Chicago
Symphony. His fellow Hungarian, Sir George Solti, also conducted
the Chicago, although he did not do as much as Reiner for its sound.
When Eugene Ormandy, who took over the legendary Philadelphia
Orchestra from Leopold Stokowski, first arrived in the United States as a
violinist from Hungary, he came under contract to go on tour with a
series of solo violin recitals. The tour did not materialize and young
Ormandy found himself stranded and penniless in New York.
To survive in the city, he took a job playing his violin, but the job he
found was a humble one as a member of the orchestra playing in the pit of
Broadway’s first-run movie theater, The Capitol.
The Capitol Theater’s music director, Erno Rapée, a fellow
Hungarian, was already well established in the music world of
New York and had come to Ormandy’s rescue, placing him among
the second violins, and in short order, moving him up to the post of
concertmaster and later to conductor.
Ormandy felt no shame in having been a pit musician. Years later,
however, during his third decade as conductor of the Philadelphia
Orchestra, he felt differently about playing in the pit.
25
He had met Martha Graham during the Mozart Festival in Salzburg
and invited her to bring her dance company to Philadelphia to dance
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring with the orchestra.
When the evening came, Ormandy expected the orchestra to
perform onstage with the company – as a soloist does in a concerto.
“Impossible!” said Ms. Graham.
But the former movie theater pit orchestra violinist was through
with playing in the pit.
“The Philadelphia Orchestra does not go down into the pit for
anyone!” he said.
They danced on stage with the orchestra.
As we remarked earlier, conductors need tremendous memories –
after all, they need to know each musicians part.
Toscanini had started life as a cellist, and his teacher once remarked
that he always knew whether or not his student had practiced an assigned
new work. If young Arturo played the piece after placing the score
on his music stand, his teacher knew he hadn’t practiced.
Once he practiced a piece it was indelibly stored in his memory and he
wouldn’t bother putting the printed music in front of him.
There are countless stories about Toscanini’s memory. Here’s just one:
In the 1940s, the aged conductor asked the NBC Symphony’s librarian
for a piece by the 19th century composer Raff, which he had studied
as a student over sixty years before. Raff was now virtually forgotten,
and there was no sign of the score he wanted to conduct.
26
‘No matter’, said Toscanini, whereupon he sat down and wrote out
all the orchestral parts to the unknown piece from memory.
Toscanini conducted everything from memory, but not just because he
had a good one – because he was short sighted and couldn’t see the music.
This has been a terrible curse for all those who have come after him –
all of whom feel they have to do the same with or without the memory.
This is not always a good idea.
Some conductors feel it necessary to doctor their name to sound
foreign, as ballerinas used to do. Stokowski’s family had changed their
name to Stokes when they migrated to England, but when it looked as if
the boy might have a career in music they changed it back to Stokowski.
More recently there is Michael Tilson Thomas, descendant of the leader of
the Yiddish theatre in New York, whose name was Tomashevsky.
27
Chapter 5
The Music Critic
These
gentry are so often quoted and make themselves so
self-important in the music world that we’d better deal with them now.
It is generally understood that
journalistic critics – music critics
in particular – are people who
make a living criticizing something
they
cannot
do
themselves.
Although this gives a great sense
of
superiority
to
the
critic,
it is a career fraught with danger,
for if the subject of the criticism makes it into the history books,
so does your idiotic comment.
This hazardous profession got its start in 1752 when a writer by the
name of Charles Avison penned a negative article on the music of
George Frederick Handel. Needless to say, this is the only thing for which
Avison is remembered today.
There are several celebrated instances of the foot-in-mouth disease to
which music critics are subject. One such unfortunate was Friedrich
Wieck, teacher, critic and most famously the father of the pianist Clara,
who became the wife of composer Robert Schumann.
28
He is today best remembered for his critical gaffes, as well as for
his great daughter.
On the occasion of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony being heard
for the first time, Wieck gave it as his professional opinion that it was
a terrible work that could only have been written by a drunk.
Wieck later tried his hand at an appreciation and analysis of Chopin’s
youthful work for piano and orchestra, Variations on Là ci darem la mano,
based on Mozart’s aria of that name. Wieck wrote a fulsome article of
praise in the German periodical Caecilia.
Chopin, with his usually fastidious and dry French wit, found the article
cloying and ridiculous and said “instead of being clever, it was stupid”
and that he didn’t want his work to “die” because of “the imagination of
that obstinate German.” This is unfair, of course, as the work is charming
and Wieck was right to recognize it.
When Wieck’s student, the emerging Romantic composer Robert
Schumann, wanted to marry his daughter, he denounced him as a man
without talent, took criticism a step further and forbade the marriage.
When Clara went to court to get permission to marry Schumann,
Wieck caused such an uproar in the court that he was sentenced to
eighteen days of jail for unruly courtroom behaviour.
The court ruled in favour of Clara and Robert, not a little because
their friend Franz Liszt, already a big celebrity, appeared in court and
announced he would perform Schumann’s music, thereby guaranteeing
his success as a composer.
29
We will find Liszt doing this sort of helpful thing throughout this
little history book.
Many critics spend their careers as wannabe wits, taking their
frustrations out on the artists who have spent their entire lives studying,
practicing and hoping for an engagement.
Such was the case when Neville Cardus, of The Guardian, wrote,
“Miss Bloggs played Brahms at the Wigmore Hall last night…
Brahms lost.”
Here are some other critiques made by contemporaries of Chopin:
In 1833 the irascible Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab wrote:
“In search of ear-rending, tortuous transition, sharp modulations,
repugnant contortions of melody and rhythm, Chopin is altogether
indefatigable.”
(Rellstab later had to revise his critical view of Chopin, when he found
he was all alone).
Actually, we owe this grumpy man some credit for having been
the one to say that Beethoven’s most popular sonata reminded him of
“Moonlight on Lake Lucerne.”
From the London Times in 1843:
“The novelty of the evening was Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor.
It is the first work on a large scale which Chopin has attempted….
It was dry and unattractive.”
Also from The Times:
30
“The Concerto in E minor is for the most part a rambling series of
passages with one or two pretty motives, with which but little is done.”
From the Dramatic and Musical Review in London of 1843:
“We cannot imagine any musician, who has not acquired an unhealthy
taste for noise, and scrambling and dissonance, to feel otherwise than
dissatisfied with the effect of either the Third Ballade, nor the
Grande Valse or the eight Mazurkas.”
Also from London – The Athenaeum in 1845:
“Cunning must be the connoisseur, indeed, who, while listening to
his music, can form the slightest idea when wrong notes are played… ”
Musical history is full of such critical comments; comments that
must have been deeply regretted by their authors.
The French – who have never quite understood Beethoven and
pronounce his name ‘Bé-tov’ – are typified by this comment on the master
in 1857, when M. Oulibicheff wrote:
“Among new signs which bring about changes in Beethoven’s style,
this sign that is like the sign of Cain, it is nothing less than a violation of
fundamental laws and of the most elementary rules of harmony –
wrong chords, and agglomerations of notes intolerable to anyone who is
not completely deprived of all auditory sense…”
(Though now quite oublié, M. Oulibicheff was actually quite useful –
as a founder of a private orchestra at a time when orchestras were rare.)
But it wasn’t only the French; a few years earlier, in 1853, the critic in
the Daily Atlas of Boston wrote:
31
“If the best critics and orchestras have failed to find the meaning of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, we may well be pardoned if we confess
our inability to find any...”
In London, where the Philharmonic Society admired Beethoven greatly
and sent him much-needed monetary support, we nevertheless read in the
Quarterly Musical magazine:
“It is not surprising that Beethoven should occasionally have
entertained blasé notions of his art; that he should have mistaken noise for
grandeur, extravagance for originality and have supposed that the interest
of his compositions would be in proportion to their duration.
That he gave little time to reflection is proved clearly by the extraordinary
length of some movements in his symphonies. His great qualities
are frequently allowed by a morbid desire for novelty; by extravagance,
and by a disdain for rule…”
Louis Spohr was the first conductor to use a baton, and was a
distinguished violinist and composer, but he had this to say of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony when he wrote his autobiography – forty years after
the work’s premiere:
“… the fourth (Choral) movement seems to me so ugly, in such
bad taste, and in the conception of Schiller’s Ode so cheap, that I cannot
even now understand how such a genius as Beethoven could write it
down.”
Liszt’s tremendous influence, presence, originality and, above all,
star power, made him fair game for many.
32
From an unidentified American newspaper of 1882 describing the
‘Dante Sonata’:
“There is no doubt that Liszt has satisfactorily described the Inferno.
Nothing so suggestive of unceasing torment and the wails of the damned
has ever been written by mortal man. Let us hope that the good Abbé
will never go to a place where his own music succeeded.”
Here, however, is an honest critic:
“One is still timid of calling the Liszt ‘Faust Symphony’ nonsense,
for fear that it might turn out in the end to be a great, if misunderstood
work” – from the Musical Review, New York, 1880.
Of Liszt’s friend Berlioz, the London Dramatic and Musical Review
said in 1843, “Berlioz, musically speaking, is a daring lunatic; a classical
composer only in Paris, the great city of quacks.”
The second part of this statement is arguable; the first absolutely
unquestionable.
In 1936, Pitts Sanborn wrote in the New York World-Telegram:
“Rachmaninoff’s ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’ sometimes sounds
like a plague of insects in the Amazon valley, sometimes like a miniature
of the Day of Judgment... and for a change goes lachrymose.”
There are many such patronizing quotes from critics who would
no doubt do anything to retract their early comments.
In New York, the leading early twentieth century American critic and
writer on music Henry Krehbiel wrote in the New York Tribune of 1900:
33
“In La Bohème, silly and inconsequential incidents and dialogues…
are daubed over with splotches of instrumental solo without reason and
without effect, except the creation of a sense of boisterous excitement
and confusion.
“In his proclamation of passion Puccini is more successful so soon as
he can become strenuous; but even here the expression is superficial
and depends upon strident phrases pounded out by hitting each note
a blow on the head as it escapes from the mouths of singers or the
accompanying instruments.”
And of Tosca, just premiered, W. F. Apthorp of the Boston
Evening Transcript wrote in 1901:
“At first hearing, much, perhaps most, of Puccini’s Tosca sounds
exceedingly, even ingeniously, ugly. Every now and then one comes
across the most ear-flaying succession of chords, then the instrumentation,
although nearly always characteristic, is often distinctly rawboned
and hideous…”
(Incidentally, that plea, “the work cannot be judged on a first hearing,”
is code in musical criticism for “I have no idea what all that was about,”
and is a catchphrase used constantly by confused critics, especially if they
are not sure sur quel pied danser – i.e., on which side of the fence to sit.)
Musical America in New York had this to say about Prokofiev,
who despite its comments had a big success in New York in 1918:
“Crashing Siberia, volcano hell, Krakatoa, sea-bottom crawlers.
Incomprehensible? So is Prokofiev.”
34
Although these critiques are entertaining and these undoubtedly great
composers survived them, some critics had an unquestioned influence
over popular taste and recognition and have entered the annals of
music history.
One of these – perhaps more than any other – was the critic
Edouard Hanslick in Vienna.
Not only did he love to pick on Wagner, he was also one of the first to
pour vitriol on another towering figure of 19th century music: the greatest
of all virtuosos, initiator of the ‘recital’, composer, friend and sponsor to
every musician of his time and all-round nice person, Franz Liszt.
Writing in 1881, after hearing Liszt’s massive and complex
Sonata in B minor, Hanslick wrote, “It is impossible to convey through
words an idea of this musical monstrosity…. Never have I experienced a
more contrived and insolent agglomeration of the most disparate elements,
a wilder rage, a bloodier battle against all that is musical. At first I felt
bewildered, then shocked and finally overcome with irresistible hilarity.
Here all criticism, all discussion must cease. Who has heard that,
and finds it beautiful, is beyond help”.
Here’s another zinger from Hanslick:
“The Russian composer Tchaikovsky is surely not an ordinary talent,
but rather an inflated one, with a genius-obsession without discrimination
or taste. Such is also his latest, long and pretentious Violin Concerto. For a
while it moves soberly, musically, not without spirit, but soon vulgarity
gains the upper hand, and asserts itself to the end of the first movement.”
35
But then, Hanslick was neither a phenomenal pianist nor composer,
and perhaps was not much of a friend to musicians, either –
except Brahms, whom he promoted as assiduously as he possibly could.
And he is now destined to have his absurd criticisms of other composers
forever quoted more than a century later.
Wagner got his own back on Hanslick in masterly fashion by using him
as the model for the villain, Beckmesser, of The Mastersingers of
Nuremberg, in which he is reduced to a petty, pedantic bureaucrat
who cannot follow his own rules when he tries to be a singer himself
in the singing contest against the young hero.
Another music critic who was not a
musician but admired for his wit, and a past
master in review malice was the playwright
George Bernard Shaw. “GBS”, as he came
to be known, inadvertently became a music
critic having been given that position on
the London newspaper, The Star, because
it was obvious he knew nothing about
politics, a fact which had given rise to many
complaints.
To protect himself from irate performers and music lovers he took the
nom de plume “Cornetto de Bassetto” (basset horn), telling his editor
this was the name of an Italian ancestor of his.
He got away with this for some time thanks to the fact the English
do not learn foreign languages.
36
Under this alias he was able to write of a pianist:
“Plysena Fletcher gained deserved applause by playing Brahms’
Second Piano Concerto courageously and even aggressively, for she
occasionally, in the abounding strength of her young blood, thumped
the keyboard as if it was Brahms’ head. And she was quite right”.
On another occasion he wrote, in the London World, in 1893:
“To me it seems quite obvious that the real Brahms is nothing more
than a sentimental voluptuary. He is the most wanton of composers.
Only his wantonness is not vicious; it is that of a great baby…
rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven
and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.”
In another display of contempt for Brahms, Shaw described his
Requiem as “so execrably dull that the very flattest of funerals would seem
like a ballet after it.”
He went on to say:
“There are some sacrifices which should not be demanded twice
from any man, and one of them is listening to Brahms’ Requiem.”
This was in fact the general attitude to Brahms for a very long time.
You see, in contrast to Wagner and Liszt, he was seen as a reactionary
harking stubbornly back to the symphonies, concertos and chamber music
of an earlier era.
In his dislike of Brahms, Shaw equaled Wieck’s disapproval of
Beethoven.
37
But it must be said, GBS was far from the only one who felt this way
about Brahms: at the turn of the 20th century and well beyond,
the musical world was dominated by a stand-off between the Wagnerians
and the Brahmsians, just as the opera house was dominated by a war
between the admirers of Wagner and those of Verdi.
Realizing that he had made a gross miscalculation, he later apologized
to Brahms for this particular review, advising him in true Shavian style
that now that he really knew the Requiem he found it “good fun”.
Calling something “jolly good fun” is a favorite put-down with
the British. One wonders whether Brahms’ English was up to these
refinements of insult and whether the apology smarted as keenly as
the original attack.
One must bear in mind that unlike today, the music experts at the turn
of the 20th century got very heated. It was a time when society, and even
the general public, became very intense about the direction classical music
was taking. Critics and would-be experts would declare all-out war
between musical styles and fight it out in the press.
In justice to Shaw, however, he also turned his acerbic wit on his fellow
music critics: he found their ponderous manner of analyzing the music
ridiculous. (This also applies to the writers of programme notes,
who have an annoying way of making the reader feel like an outsider by
giving a technical analysis that reduces the music to a myriad of
incomprehensible formulas. This snobbery is enhanced by the notes being
printed in tiny characters, in light grey, to be read in the dark.)
38
GBS showed his scorn for all this by doing a mock analysis of
Hamlet’s celebrated suicide soliloquy in the same heavy-handed way.
“How would we like it,” he asks, “if the same sort of pompous analysis
was applied to a playwright – imagine ‘To be or not to be’ thus
under the music critic’s hand:
‘Shakespeare, dispensing with the usual exordium, announces his
subject at once – in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated
after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize
the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of
repetition depends.
‘Here we reach a colon and a pointed pository phrase, in which
the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, bringing us to the first
full stop.”
He added: “A literary critic doing something of this nature would be
hauled off to Bedlam. On the other hand, the more a music critic does this,
the deeper the veneration for him.”
This battle became ferocious at times with musicians vituperative
in their opinions and criticism.
Lieder composer Hugo Wolf had this to say in print about Brahms’
Fourth Symphony:
“He never could rise above the mediocre. But such nothingness,
hollowness, such mousy obsequiousness as in the E minor Symphony,
has never yet been revealed so alarmingly in any of Brahms’ works.
39
Some of the most amusing critical gaffes have come from articles
written by critics who missed the concert altogether and tried to
piece it together from the printed programme (critics being often paid
by the review and are anxious to submit something, or anything,
to get them their fee).
Such a one seeing the listing of Johannes Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet,
a work composed for string quartet and solo clarinet, wrote,
“five clarinets in one chamber music work seems excessive.”
Sergei Prokofiev’s reputation was given a big boost by the scandal
which ensued when the critic Leonid Sabaneyev wrote a violent attack
on Prokofiev’s abrasive Scythian Suite in 1916 – the review coming out
despite the fact that the performance of the work was postponed,
and it being obvious that the reviewer could not have heard a single note
of the work. Even the rehearsals had been delayed and the score had never
left the composer’s hands.
Another pitfall for the critic is trying to identify an encore.
This happens constantly.
On one celebrated occasion, when the brilliant but highly neurotic
pianist and showman Oscar Levant was mumbling a complaint to himself
over having to play an encore, the article next day identified the encore as
“I’m Going to Miss my Train.”
Once, in a recital in Gainesville, Florida, Vladimir Horowitz changed
the scheduled Beethoven sonata, the replacement being duly announced as
Beethoven’s “Waltz-Time Sonata”; it was the “Waldstein Sonata”.
40
Critics are not the only ones who live to regret comments on a great
work or composer. Composers also often get it wrong.
One composer who shared GBS’ dislike of Brahms wrote,
“I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a
giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed
as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, Raff (a minor composer
and orchestrator of the time) is a giant, not to speak of Anton Rubinstein,
who is, after all, a live and important human being, while Brahms is
chaotic and absolutely empty, dried up stuff.”
This unfortunate quote is from the diary of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Another composer who set himself the task of commenting on a
contemporary was Camille Saint-Saëns, who wrote in 1920, two years
after the death of his younger colleague and fellow Frenchman, Debussy:
“The Prélude, ‘l’Après midi d’un Faun’, has pretty sonority,
but one does not find in it the least musical idea, properly speaking;
it resembles a piece of music as the palette used by an artist in his work
resembles a picture. Debussy did not create a style; he cultivated
an absence of style, logic and common sense.”
Actually, this is a rather clever description of Debussy’s music,
even though its amorphous beauty has given it a place among many of
our greatest works.
Another famous French composer, Charles Gounod, remarked on
leaving the concert hall after the premiere of César Franck’s Symphony in
D minor, “The affirmation of incompetence pushed to dogmatic lengths.”
41
This is also a rather clever, pithy French comment.
When Gioacchino Rossini was asked about Richard Wagner – his polar
opposite in musical character – he answered, “Wagner has some beautiful
moments – and some awful half hours.”
He also heard Lohengrin, and, pressed to give an opinion, said:
“One cannot judge Lohengrin on a first hearing, and I certainly
don’t intend to hear it a second time.”
Perhaps the joke was on the questioner, however, who must have
known that Rossini, the composer of such clever, light, sophisticated
works as The Barber of Seville, The Italian Girl in Algiers and others,
could hardly be expected to enjoy the fantastic affairs of Icelandic and
Germanic pagan gods in a dark, forested half-world.
Rossini was not always as cruel as in his comments about Lohengrin.
Once a young composer brought him two new works for his commentary.
After he had played the first, he timidly asked the master what he thought
of it. “I prefer the other one,” said Rossini.
As a critic Rossini was less tactful. He said, “There are only two kinds
of music: good music and boring music.”
Although Rossini was Italian and celebrated everywhere for his operas,
the French nevertheless considered him one of their own. France has
its own ways of formalizing their affairs, however, and gave him the title
‘Inspecteur Général du Chant en France’. Having an inspector-general for
singing is not so odd when you consider that the French have pastry police
who monitor how pastries are made and look and how much they cost.
42
As far as Wagner is concerned, his vast works, with their prodigious
length, rich harmonies and extraordinary tales of supernatural heroes,
have always made them a tempting target for wits.
One such commentator was the critic David Randolph, who said of
Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal, “it is the kind of opera that starts at
6 o’clock and three hours later you look at your watch and it says 6.20.”
Opera, with its extravagant emotions, plots, mad-scenes, death-scenes,
sets and costumes are ready game for the critic.
While traveling in Europe, Mark Twain found his way to a
performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin – in A Tramp Abroad he describes it
as a horrific experience, one in which “the banging and shouting and
screaming were unbearable.”
He wrote, “I hadn’t felt such pain since my last visit to the dentist.”
These comments pale before the hysterical words of the celebrated
English art and culture critic John Ruskin, who wrote,
“Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff
I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night (Die Meistersinger) beat
all – as far as the story and acting went – and of all the affected, sapless,
souless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsy–turviest…
and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured, the deadliness of that
eternity of nothing was the deadliest – as far as the sound went.”
Wagner took no revenge on this – except to write another opera.
Mozart had not been above using his operas to take revenge on his
enemies.
43
As a youth, albeit an extraordinary one, he had literally been kicked out
of the palace of his employer, Prince Archbishop of Salzburg,
Heironymus Colloredo, for insubordination. He was actually rudely booted
out by the archbishop’s steward, Count Arco. Of this man Mozart wrote,
“I must have my revenge.”
He had it in his German-language opera the The Abduction From
the Seraglio, when he put the Count in the role of the Pasha’s ragingly
rude, contemptuous steward and arch-fiend (Mozart’s description), and
by naming him Arco, which served double duty as it was also a play on
the word arch-episcopal.
So opera is ready game for the critic and has been a target of wits,
from the earliest appearance of criticism.
In London, during the first part of the 18th century, Joseph Addison
and Richard Steele published The Spectator, a weekly periodical
which
has
survived
in
various
forms
until
the
present
day.
Addison’s cutting mockery of the fashion for Italian opera in the London
of that time was a major influence in reducing its popularity. In a country
and society that seemed incapable of learning a second language,
Addison thought the use of Italian onstage an absurd affectation.
He wrote this in The Spectator of March 21, 1710:
“We no longer understand the language of our stage insomuch that
I have often been afraid, when I have seen our Italian performers
chattering in the vehemence of action, that they have been calling us
names and abusing us among themselves.”
44
Of course, the same is true in our day when just as few understand
Italian, but today we have been rescued by the ‘sur-title’, which has
at least told our audiences when to laugh and when to cry.
Addison’s disdain for England’s love affair with Italian opera put it into
momentary decline. It also influenced John Gay and Johann Pepusch
when they collaborated on what became the rage of the London theatre
season of 1728, The Beggar’s Opera.
This was a change from the ubiquitous Greek gods and Roman warriors
of Italian 17th century opera: in other words, it was a forerunner of
the modern musical.
Perhaps we must credit Addison for making an opening for this
racy kind of work, which no doubt influenced the Viennese promoter
Emanuel Schikaneder when he produced a new opera by Mozart – using
German, as Gay and Pepusch had done using English – and also including
long sections of spoken dialogue.
This was The Magic Flute.
So, we can see that the path that began with The Beggar’s Opera led to
The Magic Flute, then continued on its way through Jacques Offenbach’s
naughty Parisian comic operas to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan,
and finally reached across the Atlantic to Broadway.
Finally, one needn’t worry too much abut what critics say – it is the
audience that made these changes come about, and what music will live or
die, and critics have, fortunately, very little say in the matter.
45
PART II
What You Need to Know about
the Great Composers
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
(1685 – 1750)
It
is not enough to know that Bach had twenty children.
There are a few more salient facts you must know to pass yourself off
as one of the cognoscenti.
For instance: Johann Sebastian Bach
was born to a very large family of
musicians in Eisenach, Germany in 1685.
So many generations of the Bach family
had been musicians that the name Bach
became synonymous with musician.
If one were to go to that part of Germany
and wanted to engage a musician,
one could ask the natives where one
might find a Bach, it had become a brand name for a living musician –
and in keeping with this tradition three of his sons became well known
composers.
46
This can be confusing if you don’t look carefully at the name of the
composer on the music. Rather than Johann Sebastian Bach, it might be
Wilhelm Friedmann or Johann Christian or Carl Philip Emmanuel.
Unlike the musicians who are only appreciated after their death,
J. S. Bach was admired at the time. Even Haydn, who as we mentioned
earlier invented sonata-form and the symphony a generation later,
said that, in fact, Bach had invented it, which was taking his own modesty
to an extreme.
Bach had to live with an older brother (naturally, also a musician),
who forbade him to listen or play Italian music, especially that of Vivaldi,
whose music was not only vivacious and frivolous, but who was
a red-haired Roman Catholic priest – a definite no-no in the Bachs’
Lutheran household. He did anyway, although he had to do it at night.
Bach played many instruments as well as the church organ.
However, it was because he was seen sitting on the organ bench
very close to his cousin Maria Barbara he was expected to marry her.
That was his first wife and they seem to have been happy together.
As an organist his reputation grew to such an extent that France’s
‘Sun King’, Louis XIV, requested that a competition should take place
between his own court organist, Louis Marchand, and Bach, and boasted
that his own man would be the challenger and would win hands down.
The competition was arranged and there was a lot of betting over
the outcome as the date approached and excitement rose. The event,
which was to have taken place in Dresden, never materialized, however.
47
When Marchand went to check out the organ that was to be the played
during the contest, he heard his opponent practicing. He found the other’s
playing so brilliant, he ran away.
Bach was married twice. Maria Barbara bore him several children,
but died while he was still in the prime of life. He then married
Anna Magdalena, who bore him still more children, which is how twenty
children were eventually born to him.
Those of his sons who became musical figures included the first-born
son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was a good musician and composer,
but was also a drunk.
The second to become a musician, Carl Phillip Emmanuel, was
a very competent and innovative composer and, unlike his brother,
a sober, orderly fellow; as a result of his orderliness we have not only
all his own output but fifty per cent of his father’s: most of the other fifty
per cent, left to his older brother, was lost, much of it, presumably going
to pay for fresh supplies of the fermented beverages he consumed
in such quantity.
That is assumed to be the reason why, as we will see in a later chapter,
the effort to collect all of Bach’s compositions launched later by
Mendelssohn came up short.
C. P. E. Bach was the first great clavier – ‘fortepiano’ – player and
composer.
Today everyone who has studied the piano knows this son, as he was
the composer of the Solfegietto, which all young pianists learn.
48
The third son to become a noted musician, Johann Christian Bach,
also achieved a good measure of fame, and was much younger than W. F.
and C. P. E. – he was the eighteenth child born, and the eleventh son.
Johann Christian went to live and work in the opera houses of Italy,
then in London, where he lived for a quarter of a century.
He died there, and is known as “the English Bach”.
When Mozart was brought to London during his childhood tour of the
capitals of Western Europe, the family took lodgings in the very building
where J. C. Bach was living, and the two became close friends.
J. C. Bach readily recognized the extraordinary genius of the sevenyear old boy and was pleased to help him with his compositions.
The London climate had its effect on Mozart père. He became ill
and had to take to his bed. Young Mozart was asked not to play anything
lest his bedridden father be disturbed.
Mozart obeyed, and took to composing instead. A respectable number
of instrumental and orchestral works were produced, some of them with
J. C. Bach providing some suggestions and many approving nods.
J. C. Bach composed in a style that became known as ‘style galant’ –
very different from his father’s then outmoded style; all experts have to
know this when speaking of Mozart, who we will meet shortly.
W. F., C. P. E. and J. C. Bach are not to be confused with P. D. Q.
Bach, who was “discovered” by Peter Schickele, Professor of Music at
The University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople.
49
Professor Schickele has managed to attribute to P. D. Q. such
hitherto unknown works as the Sanka Cantata (inspired by J. S.’s ‘Coffee’
Cantata), the Goldbrick Variations, Ode to the Common Cold, a Schleptet,
a Concerto for Horn and Hardart, none of which will confuse the expert.
Most young piano students who quit piano have been made to learn
Bach’s easy pieces written as a birthday present for his second wife,
Anna Magdalena, to teach her how to play. These were written to make
piano lessons a pleasant experience, however they may seem to a child.
Some people believe that Bach’s music is healing. One of those was
the cellist Pablo Casals, who said that playing Bach cured his arthritis.
“It has to be Bach,” he insisted. He started each day with a piece by Bach.
Albert Schweitzer, the world-famous philosopher, theologian, physician
and organist felt the same, but then you must remember that Schweitzer
spent many years in darkest Africa, where anything might seem healing.
Most of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music was written “For the greater
glory of God”, in a Lutheran setting. He composed scores of cantatas for
the weekly services at Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, where he was the
cantor. He wrote the two great ‘Passions’ for the services of Good Friday,
the ‘Passion of Our Lord According to St. Matthew’ (aka the St. Matthew
Passion) and the ‘Passion According to St. John’.
Neither Bach nor his great colleague George Frederick Handel were
in the least bigoted, however, and when Bach had the idea of leaving
Leipzig and seeking employment in Dresden, where the king was Catholic,
he composed the great B Minor Mass.
50
This either shows that music transcends petty human divisions, or that,
like other composers, Bach wrote on commission.
But in the event, Bach never left Leipzig for long.
Before he died, in 1750, Bach underwent a desperate effort to
restore his eyesight and allowed a doctor to operate on his cataracts with
neither anaesthetic nor antibiotics. It is hard to imagine such courage,
but the doctor who tried this did the same thing to Handel in London.
With all this said, one must also admit that Bach is responsible
for composing the most boring piece of great music ever composed.
(This was long before Phillip Glass, you understand).
In fairness, he did it on purpose – unlike Phillip Glass – on commission
from a Count Keyserling, the Russian Ambassador to the court at Dresden,
who couldn’t sleep.
Bach fulfilled the request by composing The Goldberg Variations,
which was far better than counting sheep and for this he received the most
generous commission of his career. The work is a set of thirty variations
on a simple theme, many of them inordinately elaborate and difficult.
Why were they called ‘Goldberg’? Because that was the name of
the harpsichordist who was to play them, one Johann Gottlieb Goldberg,
who played in the count’s orchestra and was responsible for performing it,
and who has managed to get out of them the fifteen minutes of fame
promised by Andy Warhol. When faced with the task of finding a gift for
someone it is unwise to give them a recording of the Goldberg Variations,
unless they have especially asked for one.
51
Bach composed another set of variations late in his life. He made
the long trek to Potsdam to visit his son, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach,
who was then the court composer to King Frederick the Great of Prussia.
When he arrived, the king was rehearsing some music for flute and
orchestra that the younger Bach had composed for him. The King
was a very competent flutist (it is no longer fashionable to say “flautist”)
and C. P. E. Bach wrote a number of flute pieces to be played by
his royal patron.
We also know that the King did a commendable job as a composer;
several concertos for flute and orchestra by him have been recorded.
Well, when news was brought to Frederick about J. S. Bach’s arrival,
he halted the music playing at once, announcing that “‘Old Bach’
has arrived and we must go to greet him.”
They all trooped out to welcome the traveler and the King immediately
gave him an assignment. Without giving him a chance to remove his coat
and the dust of travel, Frederick asked for some improvisations on a
theme.
Bach asked for a theme to improvise upon and His Majesty scribbled
down a simple theme on a sheet of lined paper. This has come to be known
as The King’s Theme and Bach won the king’s praise by producing
instantaneous variations, which he performed on the royal keyboard.
His Majesty was delighted and even more so when Bach composed
multiple additional variations, including two for flute when he got home to
Leipzig. This turned into A Musical Offering, one of Bach’s great works.
52
Other Royal Musicians
Having mentioned Frederick the Great this might be the proper time
to remark on some other leaders of nations who were musicians.
Richard the Lion-Hearted was a celebrated troubadour and one of the
songs he wrote was responsible for his being found when he was taken
hostage on his way home from the Crusades by Archduke Leopold V of
Austria, who then asked for an extortionate ransom
(All those familiar with the story of Robin Hood know this,
especially if they have seen the movie with Errol Flynn; Leopold was
later excommunicated for this breach in Chivalric behavior and made
to return the money).
Richard’s friend and fellow troubadour, Blondel, who was searching
for him along the route he thought he had taken, recognized the song
Richard was singing from the battlements of the Archduke’s castle –
a song he knew Richard had composed. This song is still known today.
King Henry VIII was also a flutist (flautist?). He played the old flute
known in Italian as Il Flauto Dolce and in English as the Recorder.
His inventory shows that he had a collection of several dozen artistically
constructed recorders.
He also composed music very competently, and has been incorrectly
credited with composing Greensleeves – which in fact dates from
a far earlier period.
53
King João IV of Portugal, who reigned during the 17th Century, was
not only strikingly handsome, won independence for Portugal and wrote
important treatises on music, but was also a composer: his Crux Fidelis
is still performed.
Louis XIV of France was an expert lutenist and pretty well invented
classical ballet as an established art form.
Some
heads of state who were known for their piano playing
include Ignace Jan Paderewski, leading international piano virtuoso,
who was elected first Prime Minister of Poland after World War I,
President Harry Truman, who often surprised his fellow citizens by
playing competent pop piano, and Richard Nixon, too.
54
GEORGE FREDERIC HANDEL
(1685 – 1759)
As far as Handel is concerned, one has to know more about him than
that he wrote the Water Music and the Hallelujah Chorus.
Handel was born in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, also in
Germany, and was brought up near the town of Halle. (The first full-time
professional symphony orchestra in England, founded in Birmingham in
1856, is called the Hallé Orchestra, but that has nothing to do with Handel.
It was the name of the orchestra’s founding conductor, Sir Charles Hallé,
who also came from this part of Germany, but who added the accent to
seem French while studying piano as a young man in Paris with Chopin).
Both Bach and Handel made their marks
composing the great contrapuntal, polyphonic
(many voiced) works of that era; both grew
overweight; both wore heavy wigs; both went
blind at around the same stage of life –
and both had the same British surgeon who
made matters worse with his failed operations
on their cataracts.
They knew of each other, knew each other’s
music although they never actually met
in person, and they were both much admired. The chief difference
between them was that Bach had twenty children and Handel had none.
Also, Handel composed a number of operas and Bach composed none.
55
The year of their birth (1685) was a good one for composers.
It was also the year the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti was born.
It is easy to confuse the Scarlattis – the father, Alessandro Scarlatti, was
an important composer of Italian opera; the son composed some operas,
but his principal writing, for which he is known, was for the harpsichord.
Unlike the other two born in that year, Handel did not come from
a family of musicians. In fact, Handel’s father expressly forbade his son
to follow a musical career. In his opinion, it was no profession for a nice
German boy. His father insisted that he make something of himself and
study law. Even today this is good advice for a young man who thinks
he is going to make a living in music.
The prohibition was meant very seriously, which is the reason for
the famous drawing of the child Handel caught red-handed practicing
the clavier in the dead of night. The picture shows the parents in their
night clothes coming into the dark room holding a lantern aloft,
surprising the child at the keyboard. He had muffled the sound of the
instrument and was playing in the dark to avoid calling attention to
the disobeying of his father’s edict. This is reminiscent of what Bach did
when he studied the Vivaldi forbidden by his brother.
Young George was a dutiful son and despite the fact that his father died
he kept his word to him and went to law school. He had no intention of
continuing on in law, however. He said goodbye to it as soon as he had
passed the exams.
He went to Hamburg and took a job as violinist in the orchestra of
the Hamburg Opera.
56
The director was a prominent musician of the period named Matheson,
who composed operas, conducted the orchestra and directed the singers,
and did some singing on stage himself. In one of his operas, Matheson
took on the role of a man who is killed at the end of the first act.
Having recognized young Handel as a major talent right at the outset,
Matheson gave him the assignment of conducting the orchestra while
he himself was on stage singing and dying.
Having finished his aria he would go down to the pit to continue
conducting. However, one night Handel refused to relinquish his position
at the podium and return to his chair in the violin section. He continued to
conduct, which enraged Matheson to such a degree that he challenged
the usurper to a duel.
The duel did, in fact, take place in the Hamburg Goose Market
with seconds present. Handel might have been finished then as he was
no swordsman. Fortunately, the tip of Matheson’s sword hit a big button
on the great coat Handel was wearing, which snapped it off and saved
his life. Both duelists were very relieved that the contest ended without
tragic results; the friendship was restored and the two men went off to a
rathskeller to formalize the restoration, celebrating well into the night.
Music history reveals a few other dueling events. The Russian poet and
dramatist Alexander Pushkin – the author of the works on which
Tchaikovsky’s operas Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and
Rimsky-Korsakov's less known Mozart and Salieri – were based,
died as the result of a duel, in his case the more usual cause: a dispute over
a woman.
57
To get back to Handel – after the life-saving experience of the
coat button, he traveled to Italy to study opera. He found that he had a real
aptitude for it and in short order had become recognized as an outstanding
exponent of this type of music.
Like Bach, and unlike most of the inhabitants of Europe at that time,
Handel was not a bigot, and although a Lutheran, while in Rome
he went to work for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, the very musical
vice chancellor to the Pope.
For Ottoboni, Handel composed various works for the Catholic
liturgy including Vespers and an oratorio based on the Resurrection.
This was performed with great éclat.
But it was his operas that created his reputation; he had a long series of
smash hits, thus bringing himself to the attention of the Elector of Hanover
back in Germany, who offered him the position of Royal Kapelmeister.
Handel very sensibly felt he couldn’t refuse this offer and he was soon
composing Italian operas and directing their performances at the Court in
Hanover. However, an envoy came to him from London with an offer to
spend a year in the English capital putting on his own operas.
At first the Prince Elector was pleased with this, boasting that people in
other countries knew where to go when seeking talent at a brilliant court,
but after a second season in London Handel just didn’t come back.
Handel might have got away with this, only shortly afterwards
the English, dissatisfied with the Stuarts, brought the Elector of Hanover
in as King of England: he became ‘George I’.
58
Handel may have felt somewhat apprehensive when he realized that
the man scheduled to sit upon the British throne was none other than
his old employer.
The following story is apocryphal, but everybody tells it, so we have to
repeat it anyway. Here it is:
Handel now felt that he was in a delicate predicament, having reneged
on his contract with George, but he was a resourceful man and prepared
himself for the king’s arrival. This would be by water, as the river Thames
was the great highway of London in those days, the streets being narrow
and full of mud.
His plan worked and as the teams of oarsmen brought the royal barge
up the river, another barge approached it, gaily decorated and filled with
musicians playing a lively suite of dances, which Handel had composed
specially for the occasion.
This is the famous ‘Water Music’ that is still very popular today.
Naturally, the king overlooked Handel’s insubordination, and his career
continued in England with great success.
Well, that’s the story, but of course in reality the reconciliation between
the new King and his disloyal subject had already taken place before
the work was composed.
Furthermore, it was composed as a commission from the King.
When it was played, the King liked it so much he had it repeated.
They say truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case the fiction
is more fun.
59
The Royal Water Music was
followed a few years later
by The Royal Fireworks
Music. This was composed
to
celebrate
a
military
victory by the succeeding
king, George II – the last
British monarch to actually
take the field in military
engagements.
To celebrate the victory, an outdoors concert was planned in Green
Park. A temporary Pantheon was set up there with all manner of plaster
sculptures of Roman Gods among which British commanders were placed.
Italian fireworks specialists were imported to put on a spectacular
display and Handel was commissioned to compose music to accompany
all this.
One should always take into account the unpredictable and generally
rotten weather when planning an outdoor event in London – or in any part
of the British Isles, actually. Both the king and Handel were German,
so they may not have realized this.
As any Englishman would have expected, the weather was so bad
on the night of the celebration that it became a disaster. The rain came
down in torrents and the fireworks wouldn’t go off. In a desperate attempt
to get things moving, the imported specialists started a fire that soon
burned down the whole pantheon.
60
A panic began and many people were trampled, some seriously.
But Handel kept the music going and was undoubtedly in large measure
responsible for calming the crowd.
They had a thorough soaking, but at least it was a soaking with
rainwater, not with blood.
Another good Handel anecdote to know was that he was in serious
financial trouble shortly after this because the British had gradually
developed a contempt for Italian opera. It must have finally come through
to them that it was ‘foreign’ – not something that the British like at all.
Out went the Italian Opera, with their Greek gods and Roman warriors,
and in came the work of John Gay and Johann Pepusch based on the type
of highwaymen and ruffians you might meet any day you took a walk
in 18th century London – or even today, come to think of it.
In this kind of thing you knew what was being said – as they were in
English – and they didn’t sing all the time. This was The Beggars’ Opera.
However, apart from this, the British had a very hard time coming up
with any composers for so long that Handel remained the number one
favourite in England for many generations, and even then he was
only replaced in their affection by another composer from Germany,
Felix Mendelssohn – which we will explain later.
One other anecdote is worth knowing because it shows you know
all about Handel: he was due to produce a new work in Dublin;
it turned out to be one that would mark our Christmas season for the next
three hundred years: The Messiah.
61
The effectiveness of this music is illustrated in a variety of incidents
during its premiere:
When the aria He was despised was being sung, a certain Reverend
Dr. Delaney, the arbiter of strict morals in the city, was so moved that he
sprung to his feet and called out, “For this let all thy sins be forgiven
thee.”
This was addressed to the singer who was known to have taken
the part of Polly Peachum in The Beggars’Opera, and was therefore
not a respectable woman.
At the London performance, George II was in the royal box.
He was so moved by the Hallelujah Chorus that he leaped to his feet
and remained standing (when the King stands, all his loyal subjects stand).
Thus the entire audience stood up and another grand British tradition
was born. It is now traditional to do so; if you leap to your feet as the first
notes of the chorus sound it will show you know what is going on.
This work that began life in Dublin’s Music Hall on Fish Street is today
given more often and in more places than any other major piece of music.
Handel had learned his lesson. From that point on, he set his music
to English texts and to stories that were familiar to his listeners.
All of this shows that Handel was a shrewd politician.
Commissioned to write a work celebrating the infamous battle of
Collodon, when the forces of George II crushed the heroic resistance of
the Scots to English rule, he wisely set music to quite a different conflict:
that of the struggle of The Maccabees against the Syrians and the Greeks.
62
Besides, for all he knew, the Stuarts might return to the English throne
and he had to be careful. He didn’t want to be caught out twice in that kind
of a mix-up. Further, the Jews, expelled from England centuries earlier,
had returned. Former Sephardi Dutch merchants, they were already
a relatively affluent group in London, and when they heard there was a
hero from the Hebrew Testament on the stage, they flocked to the theater.
The performances were sold out.
Handel subsequently composed a whole series of oratorios featuring
Old Testament characters: Saul, Esther, Samson, Joshua, Solomon, Judith,
Deborah, Israel in Egypt, and many more. Oratorio thenceforth became
the quintessential English musical form, lending itself perfectly to the uses
of amateur choral societies and festivals up and down the country.
Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey beside some of Britain's most
illustrious literary and musical figures. Over his tomb are emblazoned
words taken from the text of The Messiah –
“I know that my Redeemer liveth.”
63
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
(1732 – 1809)
Haydn is the next great composer to know about. There are no
very amusing stories about this very nice man, so scholars have tried to
come up with something to talk about. The best they could come up with
was to say that his forebears, coming from a region populated by Croatians
and Gypsies as well as Austrians and Germans, may have been Croatian,
or ‘Bohemian’, as they used to say for Czech, but this has been disproven.
So there’s really nothing much
to say about this professional and
unassuming
man
–
except
that
he invented the Symphony, which is
quite enough in itself.
Haydn was born in 1732, one of the
twelve children of a wheelwright in
Rohrau, near the Austrian border with
Hungary. He had an uncle, however,
who had become a singer/musician and
who thought it would be helpful if he
found a profession for one of the children.
When the uncle came for a visit, he decided that little Joseph was
the one who had the most promise to be formed into a musician – which
was what the uncle knew how to do. So, when Joseph was still a very little
boy he went to live with his uncle, who trained his voice and his ear.
64
The boy did so well that he took him to Vienna where little
Franz Josef was accepted into what we call the Vienna Boys Choir today.
Here he was given an academic as well as a musical education.
Franz Josef was mischievous – he thought it was funny to snip off the
queue of hair hanging down from the black bow of the boy in front of him.
In those days young men tied their hair back in that style. Unfortunately,
this was at the time when his voice beginning to change, and, as his
usefulness to the choir was coming to an end, he was expelled out into
Vienna with nothing to live on – rather than being kept on as a teacher.
At this point Haydn did what all musicians do: he went to live with
friends.
Fortunately, however, he was also found a job as summer musician to
a nobleman named Count Morzin. This was such a success that the Count
introduced him to his friend Prince Esterházy and Haydn spent the rest
of his professional life in the employ of this princely family.
Now this is important to know as a conversational know-it-all in music:
up until quite recently it has been fashionable to sneer at the fact that
Haydn and musicians of his and prior generations worked for a patron,
rather than starving in a garret as an independent professional.
No one sneers now.
Musicians today would sell their souls for such a patron and try
like anything to find a corporation or a philanthropic organization that will
act as one, rather than try to deal with mercenary and perverse managers
and agents, or teach snotty children who won’t practice.
65
There were no interesting scandals in Haydn’s life. The girl he liked
decided to go into a convent and he made the mistake of marrying her
sister. The marriage was a failure and he did not even have the satisfaction
of children. This is an inconvenience for those who want to tell anecdotes,
and it has always been a frustration to writers.
The very pessimistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzche said, “So far as
genius can exist in a man who is merely virtuous, Haydn had it.”
Despite this, we owe him an immense debt. The Esterházy family gave
him every resource he needed to compose and, as we said earlier, we owe
to Haydn the development of the sonata-form system that he evolved for
symphonies, concertos, string quartets and sonatas etc. This is why he
is known as “Papa” Haydn. All subsequent composers owe him this debt.
Sadly for Haydn, however, his immediate successors, Mozart and
Beethoven, were able to compose even more memorable music than he
while using his system, which doesn’t seem fair.
While acting as court composer to Prince Esterházy, Haydn lived in
the rural setting of the prince’s country estates and therefore spent most of
his professional life away from Vienna. First there was Eisenstadt –
not very far from Vienna, but far enough – and later the still more rustic
Esterház. In the last years of his life he mused that since he lived so far
removed from where the action was there were no influences upon him;
he didn’t hear other people’s music and therefore had nothing to remember
– or filch. Of course, one must remember, too, that it was a time when
there was neither radio nor recordings.
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“Perforce, I had to be original,” he said.
Towards the end of his career Haydn made two trips to London,
where he was an enormous success. There he was put on by Johann Peter
Salomon, the very first true ‘music manager’ or ‘impresario’ (in England
they still like to call managers by the old-fashioned term ‘impresario’).
Now this is someone who makes a fortune presenting musicians
who make peanuts.
Salomon introduced Haydn with several new symphonies (the so-called
‘London’ Symphonies) in an organized series of concerts. These were,
in fact, the first such “subscription” concerts ever given in any city –
the sort of presentation we take for granted today.
He was also awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University.
He might have stayed, but chose to return to the Esterházys. The fact that
he couldn’t speak any English may have had something to do with this.
Haydn lived a long life by the standards of those days, dying at
age seventy-seven in 1809.
67
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
(1756 – 91)
It is absolutely essential to know some stories about Mozart, as he is
the most frequently performed classical composer in the world today.
The first fact to know might
be that he always chose to sign
himself by that rather annoying
middle
This
name,
could
“Wolfgang”
“Amadeus.”
be
didn’t
because
sound
very aesthetic, and the German
form of Amadeus – “Gottlieb”
– wasn’t much better.
This may or may not tell us
something about him.
Mark well: Mozart has the advantage of being a composer it is safe
to admit to liking. In fact, it is essential to say you love Mozart, however
you may actually feel about hearing his works played almost to the
exclusion of all else. For some reason – this marks you as an expert.
Modern composers might take note of the fact that Mozart’s on-going
popularity is due to the charm of his music, the cleverness and sweetness
of his melodies and the subtle intelligence of his harmonies and structures;
this may account for his music still being more popular than theirs.
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Also, one reason he is a favorite with musical specialists may be that
it gives them a soothing rest from the other music they are supposed to
consider interesting.
In a magazine article about the Glyndebourne Festival in England,
John Christie, the owner of the famous country opera house – where cows
are very much in the picture – said, “When Stravinsky is being played,
the cows move away. When it is Mozart they always come closer.”
Of all the things to know about Mozart, the first is, of course, that
he was the most astonishing child prodigy on record and unlike many of
these children, did not fizzle out, but went on to become a composer of
truly amazingly beautiful music as an adult.
A word here about musical children:
One hears many exclaim with wonder when they hear that a musician
could play very young, say four or five years old. But this is the rule,
not the exception, and should not surprise anyone.
The number of outstanding musicians who came to music in a serious
way in their teens or early twenties are extremely few and far between.
In fact, there are only four who come readily to mind; we might as well
name them here: Berlioz, Schumann and Tchaikovsky – who were not
pianists – and Ignace Paderewski, who became one. These are very much
the exceptions to the rule.
Let it be understood: it is children who can do this. Adults are only
coasting on co-ordinations learnt or developed as children under the age of
ten – co-ordinations of ear, hand and eye that cannot be learnt later.
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Even with this in mind, Mozart was truly extraordinary.
For instance, it was told by his father, Leopold Mozart, an expert
violinist and teacher, that he came home one evening to find his four year
old son bent over some music paper filled with notes, ink blots, and areas
made damp by tears. The child told his father as he leaned down to see
what he was up to, that he was composing a concerto, and indeed, he was.
The father picked up the top sheet and saw to his amazement that not
only was his tiny offspring creating a concerto but that it seemed to be so
difficult a work that few could play it. Leopold was overcome by emotion
over this miracle and shed tears.
Although this may be a true story, one must bear in mind that
Leopold Mozart was an expert at public relations and promotion and
subsequently was able to organize a tour involving his little son and
daughter in performances before many of the crowned heads of Europe.
The tour was carried out in the age-old show business tradition:
Leopold was skillful in the use of the promotional activity known as
‘ballyhoo’, and each time the touring family arrived in a city he would
print and distribute announcements that would have impressed
P. T. Barnum.
It was promised that the two children would play difficult music
together; that the boy would improvise, play blindfold, play with his back
to the piano; and identify immediately any note, whether played on
a musical instrument or struck on a goblet or a pot from the kitchen
(the little boy could actually do all this).
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At a performance for Austria’s Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna’s
Schönbrunn Palace, young Wolfie played a work by the composer
Wagenseil, who was present. At the boy’s request, this composer
turned the pages of his music, and the sight-reading and playing of
difficult passages were so impressive that the man was moved to tears
(You will note that these Austrians all cried a lot).
The Empress was thrilled by the little fellow’s feats of ear, memory
and dexterity and took him on her lap, kissed him affectionately, and
ordered gifts brought in. The little fellow, already a fop, was particularly
overjoyed with some glittering clothes from the imperial wardrobe.
He showed his pleasure by leaping off the empress’s lap and running
exuberantly all around the room. The floors at Schönbrunn are made of
polished marble and sure enough, the celebratory gamboling came to an
abrupt end when Mozart slipped, skidded, and crashed down on the floor.
He fell hard and the tears began to gush, but the Maria Teresa’s daughter,
a young princess a year older than the boy wonder, rushed to comfort him.
She helped him to his feet, dried his tears with her kerchief,
and said something soothing. He thanked her gravely, saying:
“You are very kind. When I grow up I will marry you.”
The young princess was Marie Antoinette, later the ill-fated Queen of
France. Everyone laughed, but it might have actually been a better fate for
Marie Antoinette.
The Mozart family continued on their tour and had great success in
France when they performed at Versailles.
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Again, everyone was stunned by the abilities displayed by the Mozart
children. They were particularly taken by little Wolferl and vied with each
other in showering him with affection.
Only one person remained coldly aloof: King Louis XV’s mistress,
Madame de Pompadour, who turned away disdainfully when the lad
approached her for what he was sure would be a show of affection.
“Who is this woman who will not kiss me?” he wanted to know.
“Even the Empress kisses me,” he added proudly.
La Pompadour, it would seem, found him a spoiled brat, and there’s
a good chance that he was.
When the touring Mozarts reached London, George III was king
and his Kapellmeister was Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann
Sebastian, who, as we saw earlier, was known as the ‘London Bach’.
He and young Wolfgang developed a close friendship and the admiration
was mutual. Johann Christian was a great influence upon Mozart’s
compositional style, as we explained earlier.
Before leaving Paris, the boy had published four violin sonatas, and
had them with him when he reached the British capital. Johann Christian
was impressed by the well-crafted works and by the first Mozart
symphonies.
He arranged to have the lad give several concerts at London’s
Vauxhall Gardens. These were very successful and usually consisted
exclusively of music composed by the young lad, who was just reaching
his tenth birthday.
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A little over a year later, they returned to Vienna. This time it was not
the heady, triumphal reception of the prior visit. The city was in mourning
over the death of a member of the imperial family from smallpox, a young
princess who was carried off just as she was about to be married. Smallpox
hit Mozart himself and, although he recovered, he was laid low for a time.
Despite this, the Emperor commissioned an opera – the result was
La Finta Semplice, brought to life with impressive rapidity. Performers
at the Imperial Opera, however, resented being asked to sing in an opera
composed by a child and saw to it that the work was kept off the stage.
That was also the fate of a charming little comic opera called
Bastien et Bastienne. The Imperial Opera people made sure it wasn’t done
at the opera house. It was performed, nevertheless, but in another hall.
The patron in that instance was Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer,
who had a very lucrative medical practice in Vienna and was established
in a splendid palace. The opera was presented there, was very well
received and has been performed regularly ever since. You will note that
we get the word ‘mesmerize’ from this man as he healed his patients by
hypnosis; he also coined the term personal ‘magnetism’.
The success of Mesmer’s treatments were explained by him as
his ability to pass his ‘animal magnetism’ into the body of his patients,
magnetism being the key element.
Mozart paid his debt to this man many years later in his opera
Cosi Fan Tutte, in which the maid, Despina, who wears several disguises
during the course of the piece, makes an entrance as a doctor.
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To make sure everyone knows exactly which doctor, the directions
in the libretto require that she wear a large magnet. This is an excellent
in-joke for the expert to know.
By the time Mozart was thirteen, he was capable of turning out operas
of top quality. Papa Leopold thus decided to take him to the homeland of
opera, Italy. The time spent there was filled with noteworthy feats,
such as the one in the city of Bologna, where he responded to a challenge
involving the composition on the spot of some contrapuntal music.
He amazed his examiners by completing the test in record-breaking time.
In Milan, he was commissioned to compose a new opera, and in
short order his Mitridate, Re di Ponto was ready for presentation.
Superstitious Neopolitans were certain that his superhuman abilities were
the result of magic, suspecting the source to be a ring he wore on a finger.
His most stunning achievement took place in Rome during Holy Week,
1769. At the beginning of the week, on the day after Palm Sunday,
the Mozarts attended a musical performance in the Vatican’s Sistine
Chapel. The work being performed was Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere.
A papal decree forbade this removal of this music from the chapel
or its performance elsewhere. The penalty was excommunication, and
the Mozarts, like most Austrians, were Catholics.
Despite the prohibition and possible punishment, Leopold Mozart
was delighted to inform his wife that their son had taken the music
with him back to their lodgings – in his head, you understand –
and quickly put down the entire work with pen and ink on ruled paper.
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Later in the week, on Good Friday, the Miserere was repeated and
the Mozarts returned to hear it again. Arriving with the score inside his
three-cornered hat, he surreptitiously slipped the papers out and compared
what he had put down with the music being played. Only three corrections
were needed and carried out as soon as they were back in their rooms.
News of this phenomenal feat soon began making the rounds in Rome
and the word was that the Mozarts would be excommunicated.
Indeed, a summons soon arrived to appear before the Pope and to
bring along the boy’s written score of the work. When father and son
arrived, they were ushered into the Pope’s presence where they found
three Vatican music experts who proceeded to examine what the
thirteen year-old had recorded.
There was tension in the air before the verdict, which was given
very shortly. The verdict was that the youngster had captured the music
100%. He hadn’t missed a single note. The work, we must realize,
was no simple Protestant hymn: the Miserere is most intricate contrapuntal
music with eight interweaving lines.
Then came the judgment. Far from being excommunicated, the boy
was honored with the Papal Order of The Golden Spur.
Another good story to know is the following:
When Mozart was older and had settled in Vienna, he impressed
everyone with his brilliant performances at the keyboard. Then suddenly
the new European sensation of the keyboard, Muzio Clementi, arrived in
Vienna to give some concerts.
75
The Emperor, Joseph II, came up with the idea of staging a contest
between Mozart and the Italian pianist and composer Clementi, renowned
for his dazzling dexterity (Clementi and Mozart are rivals for the title of
first ever composer for the new instrument, the ‘piano’ – then called
‘fortepiano’ – this being a huge improvement on the harpsichord).
The competition took place and Mozart was declared the winner.
Clementi, composer of such standard piano exercise sets as Gradus ad
Parnassum, and many little sonatinas and sonatas, was a gracious loser
and congratulated his rival on his victory.
Mozart had a host of admirable qualities but graciousness and
diplomacy were not among them. His post victory comments were that
his opponent was “a charlatan, like all Italians.”
Clementi later moved to England and became a manufacturer of
pianos. This has to be explained:
Something to know about Clementi:
London was becoming increasingly affluent, which made it attractive to
musicians. Clementi knew England and decided to try his fortune there,
where he already had a friend and patron, but on his arrival he found that
the English understanding of music and musicians was nothing like that
on the Continent.
In London, rather than being treated as a celebrity and a distinguished
artist, he was thought of as a professional on the level with tradesmen
and was expected to enter the house by the servant’s entrance.
76
This situation inspired him to abandon piano playing and go into
business manufacturing pianos and publishing music, which was
considered
more
socially
acceptable,
even
though
the
English
upper classes looked down their noses at “Trade”.
Even Trade, it seems, was preferable to being a musician.
Clementi did extremely well with his pianos
and married a wealthy widow – or two –
and ended his days as a country gentleman,
respected in ‘society’, eventually being buried in
Westminster Abbey!
However, missing music, he had a pavilion built
in the garden, where he could go and play as
much as he wished. His young colleague who ran
the Clementi piano company with him was called
Collard, and as Clementi had no heir, Collard inherited the business,
which was known for many years as ‘Collard and Collard’.
Clementi also employed the young Irish pianist / composer John Field,
who toured Europe and Russia with him as salesman and demonstrator of
his pianos. They did particularly well in St. Petersburg, and Field
decided to remain there, eventually becoming ‘Court Pianist’.
Field is also known as having developed the musical form known as the
Nocturne. Sadly for Field, Chopin appropriated the form with such genius
that few remember that it was Field’s idea.
Mozart, continued:
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As a young adult Mozart continued to compose operas, three of which
were collaborations with an extraordinary librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.
Now this man was a defrocked priest who had had to leave Italy in a
hurry because of unpriestly behavior. He found refuge in the Emperor’s
court in Vienna, where he was much sought after by the group of
composers there.
The three operas he did with Mozart are the three that the expert
must seem the most knowledgeable about: The Marriage of Figaro,
Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte. Do not, under any circumstances, ever
admit to not being enamoured of these three works.
Because the reasons for his defrocking persisted after his flight from
Italy, da Ponte became friendly with none other than Giacomo Casanova.
In fact, to learn more about what Don Giovanni’s comportment should be
in certain situations, he brought in Casanova as an expert consultant on
matters of illicit love-making and seduction techniques. (‘Don Giovanni’,
we must recall, is Italian for the fabled Spanish womanizer, Don Juan.)
Sadly, one doesn’t learn much about these techniques watching the
opera.
Da Ponte married later on, having fallen madly in love with a young
lady who refused to grant her favours without the benefit of clergy.
Obviously, this was difficult to arrange, as da Ponte was himself clergy
in an outcast state.
However, the young woman was Jewish, and as his own background
was originally Jewish, he decided to return to it.
78
His family had converted to Catholicism when he was a youngster,
but having reverted to Judaism he was able to go into a marriage service
with the traditional Hebrew rituals: chupa, broken wine glass, and the rest.
Da Ponte felt such embarrassment over abandoning all the free love and
libertinism that he had once advocated and practiced, he attempted to
conceal his new respectable marital status from his old comrade-in-arms
Casanova.
He took his bride to England, where he ran into such financial trouble
that Debtor’s Prison loomed as too probable an outcome.
They avoided this by managing to make their way to the New World
where they settled for a while in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and for a time
he also operated a distillery in backwoods Pennsylvania.
He made his mark in New York City by starting the Italian literature
section of the library at Columbia College (later Columbia University) and
also at the New York Public Library, and finally of the Italian department
of the newly founded New York University.
We are not making this up.
Three decades after Mozart’s death there was an amusing last chapter
in da Ponte’s long life: the first opera company to come from Europe for
a season in New York City took place in a theater on Lower Broadway.
Under the leadership of the celebrated Spanish tenor Manuel Garcia,
the freshly arrived Italian opera company’s first offering was The Barber
of Seville. This was followed the next night by Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
(opera cognoscenti will know that these two operas are twinned).
79
Imagine Garcia’s surprise when an old man walked into the theater
during a rehearsal of the latter work and announced that he had written it.
“What do you mean?” Garcia asked. “You’re not Mozart!”
“He set it to my words.”
Mozart’s last opera was The Magic Flute – an opera sung in German.
Knowing this shows that you are knowledgeable about opera – it is one of
those much loved and often repeated facts that experts like.
Mozart’s only other opera in German was The Abduction from
the Seraglio – in German this is ‘Die Entführung aus dem serail’,
which explains why composers preferred Italian.
The commission for The Magic Flute came from the singer/impresario
Emanuel Schikaneder, whom we met earlier in the chapter on critics.
This man could not afford the Imperial Opera House, only a small
popular theater in what was then a suburb of Vienna. The audience thus
consisted of common folk rather than aristocrats, and the presentations
staged there reflected popular taste. Mozart was persuaded by Schikaneder
to try this new approach to his musical stage works and accepted the
commission.
The Emperor thought this all very odd, and that using German for opera
was somehow incorrect, but is best remembered for having told Mozart
that his music had “Too many notes!”
Mozart’s response was that there were just as many notes as were
needed – no more, no less. Courtiers present were shocked by this
frank retort.
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The Magic Flute was a great success and remains one of the most
popular operas in the repertoire; it set a style for musical theatre somewhat
in the manner of The Beggar’s Opera that we mentioned earlier.
However, it deeply offended Mozart’s best supporters as it exposed and
ridiculed the secret goings on of the Masonic Order, members of which
had lent him money.
Mozart never had any tact.
Among the most frequently played works by Mozart are his
piano concertos, of which he composed twenty-seven. He composed them
at a time when he was short of money – which was most of the time,
as he and his wife had extravagant tastes, to say nothing of liking to
gamble. He self-produced these concerts, banking on his fame as a
keyboard virtuoso.
Although this was the sad result of trying to make a living without a
patron, we are beneficiaries of Mozart’s financial problems, as these are
among his most beautiful works and those most easily programmed.
Now we come to all the stories about Mozart’s death.
These are: first, that he died a pauper; second, that Antionio Salieri
poisoned him; third, that Death itself came and commissioned the
Requiem Mass, and fourth, that he was thrown into a pauper’s grave.
None of these are true.
Firstly, Mozart was perennially short of money, as we mentioned
earlier; he was extravagant, as was his wife, Constanze, who, like Mozart,
enjoyed gambling.
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Secondly, Salieri did not hurt him; he was an important and influential
man in Vienna, teaching everyone from Mozart’s own sons, to Beethoven,
Schubert and young Liszt.
Salieri himself started this unfortunate story concerning Mozart’s death
as he was a really nice man and he felt that had he been more helpful
to Mozart (who was annoying and difficult to help) the great genius
may have lived longer.
Rumors of Salieri’s supposed act of homicide have persisted because of
this and the fact that the 18th century medical diagnosis was pathetic.
Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet and dramatist, wrote a
one-act poetic drama that ends with Salieri slipping poison into Mozart’s
wine glass. Rimsky-Korsakov converted this into an opera entitled
Mozart and Salieri, as we mentioned in an earlier chapter. And since then
we have had Peter Schaffer’s versions, both play and movie.
Thirdly, Mozart was superstitious and because the commission for
the Requiem was anonymous, he thought perhaps an angel of death had
come to warn him that he wouldn’t live much longer. Over a hundred
theories have been suggested for his premature death including a rare
kidney disease; the most recent is an acute attack of rheumatic fever.
The mysterious commission, was, in fact, brought by a man who
appeared at his door giving Mozart a sum of money, saying that
his master, name withheld, wanted a Requiem Mass in memory of
his recently deceased wife. The remaining payment of an equal sum
would be given to the composer when the work was finished.
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This didn’t happen, of course, because Mozart died before it was
finished. The Requiem was finished by his student, Franz Xaver
Süssmayer, a twenty-five year-old Austrian opera composer.
The man of mystery who had paid to have the work done was a
character called Count von Walsegg who had planned to pass the work off
as his own – it was something he had done before.
Lastly, Mozart was not thrown into a ‘pauper’s grave’; rather,
at that time there had been a general order in Vienna that all dead
were to be buried in common unmarked graves. This unpleasant decree
was later revoked.
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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
(1770 – 1827)
The
most common fact usually told of Beethoven is that
he was deaf. He is usually depicted with wild hair. It is also often told how
he had a secret love to whom he wrote a long letter of renunciation,
known as the letter to the
“Immortal Beloved”. It is also
generally said that no one knows
who she was.
Most
of
this
is
true,
but not all of it.
Beethoven is usually thought
of as German or Austrian, which
has no truth – and you can often
make quite as stir by pointing
this out, as it is a common
misconception that all Classical
composers were German.
Because of this misunderstanding his name is often given wrongly as
“von” Beethoven when in fact it’s Flemish and written “van” Beethoven.
Also, Beethoven’s father is usually described as being a drunk, which is
a little unfair. He only started to drink when his wife died and he was
overwhelmed.
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This man was a relatively obscure musician in the pay of the
Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. He was knowledgeable concerning
the world of music, and was aware, as was everyone, of the sensational
career of Mozart, once a stupendous child prodigy, now a well-known
composer in Vienna.
He and his wife had four children – our Beethoven was the second,
and named Ludwig, the name by which an earlier child, who had not
survived, was also called.
As Beethoven père knew all about Mozart, he reasoned that he, too,
had a talented son, and he, too, could promote him as a boy prodigy.
He gave young Ludwig an exhausting schedule of keyboard practice and
it has been said that he was often pulled out of bed late at night and
dragged half asleep to the piano, made to practice for hours and severely
punished for bad playing.
When he was finally judged ready, some time had gone by and his
father altered his birth date to strengthen the precocity appeal that added
to the confusion of birth dates. To the end of his life, Beethoven was never
quite sure of his correct age. So you could say he was not sure about
when he was born, and, with the recycling of his name, who he was born.
Finally, the hoped-for tour never amounted to much and the boy didn’t
get to play for the crowned heads of Europe.
Beethoven grew up at a time marked by the French Revolution and he
readily took up the principles of liberty, fraternity and equality on which
it claimed to be based and applied them to his own life.
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He also applied them to his career and adopted a new style of being
an independent musician, one who would make his own way without
serving a wealthy patron.
Although this sounds all very well, it meant that he was always horribly
short of money and that his aristocratic friends had to go to a great deal of
trouble getting money to him tactfully, without ruffling his independent
spirit, which they understood very well.
His remarkable talent had been recognized early on by some young,
cultivated aristocrats who remained his friends and supporters throughout
his lifetime, no matter how bad his manners became. The most active of
these was Count Waldstein, to whom the Waldstein Sonata was dedicated.
However, Beethoven was conflicted about his democratic principles,
because although he didn’t want to bow or take his hat off to anyone,
he made sure that everyone knew that his name was van Beethoven, as
the “van” seemed to indicate some kind of aristocratic origin, and he took
full advantage of this.
Further, as a young man he was very good looking in a rugged sort of
way, with his hair cut in the accepted style of the day. However,
like many young people, he often confused having an independent spirit
with being very rude. On one occasion, a group led by Count Waldstein
was listening to him play, but apparently they weren’t listening attentively
enough and began talking among themselves. Beethoven slammed the lid
down on the keyboard, turned and exclaimed something like “I won’t play
before such swine!,” and stormed out of the room.
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There were many such instances; another took place in the palace of
Prince Lichnowsky, one of his most important benefactors, in whose home
many of his works were first performed. Walking past a mirror,
Beethoven spat at it, thinking it was an open window.
Beethoven was able to get away with all this because he was lovable
and his music was awe-inspiring.
Count von Waldstein, eager to help launch Beethoven’s career not only
bought him his first grand piano but arranged for his trip from Bonn to
Vienna, where he hoped Beethoven could study with Mozart.
By that time the celebrated boy wonder had become a thirty-one
year-old man and had only four years to live; Beethoven was seventeen.
However, the trip to Vienna to see Mozart was far from a success.
Mozart had a taste for fashionable dress and was unimpressed by the
young Flemish lout who came to visit him. He was untidy and inelegant.
Nonetheless he was invited in and Mozart asked him to play.
Beethoven played well but after a few minutes he became aware that
Mozart’s mind was elsewhere.
At that point, so the story goes, Beethoven began to improvise on
a simple theme and developed it into a series of intricate, dazzling
arrangements.
Beethoven has been called the greatest improviser of all time.
Mozart was duly impressed and said that he was sure that Beethoven
“would make a noise in the world.”
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Later, Beethoven’s pupil, Carl Czerny – the one who composed
all those exercise books young piano students are assigned but never play
– wrote that Beethoven improvised in a way one couldn’t believe unless
one was there. He said that he saw grown men cry over the superhuman
quality of the extemporaneous invention.
That was Beethoven’s last encounter with Mozart, however. His mother
became very ill and he rushed back to their home in Bonn. He didn’t
get back to Vienna for five years – 1792 – by which time Mozart had died.
Another anecdote that is repeated in all programme notes tells how
on his return to Vienna after Mozart’s death, Beethoven turned to
Joseph Haydn as a teacher of harmony and counterpoint, but that they
didn’t get along. This is largely what we call today an “urban myth”.
It is true, however, that Haydn was essentially an 18th century personality,
with all the refinements and formality that entailed, while Beethoven was
to become a symbol of the 19th century with its freer, more robust, style.
The story goes that Haydn thought Beethoven crude and that
Beethoven went secretly to have lessons elsewhere. It is true that
Beethoven felt
the need to get help from others in his basic training as
Haydn was bored with basics, but also this was the time Haydn was away
a lot in London, being a celebrity.
Among those he went to for help was the ubiquitous Antonio Salieri.
In fact, however, Beethoven’s early symphonies, piano sonatas, and
chamber music sound very Haydnesque, and his first piano sonatas
are inscribed as “Dedicated to his teacher, Franz Joseph Haydn.”
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And it may actually be true that when Beethoven came to visit Haydn
during his final illness and offered to play for him, Haydn accepted,
but asked him not to play anything he had written himself.
As explained earlier, despite the bad reputation that has been given him
by writers looking for a drama, Salieri was, in fact, an important and
respected member of the musical establishment and many eminent
composers went to him to learn. Apart from Beethoven, notable students
included Franz Schubert, and at the end of his long life, the boy
Franz Liszt. There were also Mozart’s sons sons, as we explained in the
Mozart chapter, and many others.
It was in 1802, at the age of thirty-two, after having established
a reputation in Vienna, that Beethoven learned that he was becoming deaf.
He was given suggestions by his doctor for some therapeutic treatment
that mainly involved giving his ears a rest from the big city noise and
hubbub of Vienna.
We now come to the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, which one must
know about to show one has understood Beethoven. Beethoven went into
the country, making a short stay in the rustic village of Heiligenstadt, at
that time a quiet spot although now it has become a part of greater Vienna.
While there, in the depths of depression, he wrote what has come to be
known as The Heiligenstadt Testament. It reads like a suicide note
intended for his brothers. He thought better of it, fortunately, and either he
never sent it or he kept a copy, as it was found later among his papers.
(In those days, people copied their letters out in a “fair hand” and it is hard
to know whether letters were sent or not; in any case we can read it today.)
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In this letter we see his distress over the one affliction a composer
would most dread: loss of his hearing.
“O ye men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn,
or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the
secret cause... For me there can be no recreation in the society of my
fellows, refined intercourse, mutual exchange of thought... I must live
like an exile,” he wrote.
But, oddly enough, his misfortune did not dim the robust and
rather clumsy sense of humour that we hear throughout his oeuvre.
The work he produced in 1802, the year he learned his fate and the
hopelessness of ever restoring his hearing, was his Second Symphony,
which is full of his rather galumphing high spirits. Beethoven is certainly
one of the great characters of history.
Here is an important fact to know. Programme listings are always
referring to ‘Scherzos’. What is this? Musical experts love to talk about
Scherzos – or ‘Scherzi’, even better. So you have to know the following:
Scherzo means ‘jest’ in Italian, but with a slightly mocking or even
grotesque character. Beethoven invented this idea, and it was adopted
by succeeding generations of composers, many of whom wrote Scherzos
(or Scherzi) as separate pieces.
Beethoven thought of it to replace the stately minuet and trio that had
been the standard third movement of Haydn and Mozart symphonies –
as well as the third movement of his own First Symphony – as he thought
the minuet was beginning to sound too dainty for the new generation.
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Next, to appear knowledgeable, one must know about the third
symphony – the ‘Eroica’, or the ‘Heroic’. Beethoven’s political views,
which, as we have seen, were somewhat contradictory, now received
another blow. Believing Napoleon Bonaparte to be the great hero who
would spread Republican freedom and equality throughout Europe,
he dedicated this work of nobility, courage and victory to him.
What was his disgust when he heard that Bonaparte had declared
himself an Emperor! Scratching out the dedication he exclaimed in a rage:
“He is only an ordinary man after all and he will turn tyrant,”
which was quite true, after all.
He rededicated the symphony to Prince Lobkowitz, who certainly
deserved it – he was an aristocrat with a non-heroic career, but
he maintained Beethoven on a retainer as well as offering his palace as
a venue for many performances of his works, as did Prince Lichnowsky.
Certainly, Beethoven’s Republican sympathies were severely stressed
by having devoted, kind friends like this.
Beethoven had another reason, later on, to be annoyed with Napoleon.
After his defeat following the great retreat from Russia, the European
powers came together in the great Congress of Vienna in an effort to put
their countries’ borders and governments back in order. Beethoven had
the greatest moment of his career when he was invited to organize
an “academy” – a ‘festival’, as we would call it today – of his own works
and others for the entertainment of these highly important men.
These included Tsar Alexander of Russia, the Duke of Wellington,
Talleyrand and many others.
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During this ‘academy’, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (the one with the
“fate” theme) and his Fourth Piano Concerto were among the works
performed. However, Beethoven was not able to capitalize on this success
as half-way through the Congress word came that Napoleon escaped from
Elba and was gathering another army. Suddenly all these influential people
left overnight to organize a defence against him. As we all know, this
all ended with the battle of Waterloo.
However, Waterloo was not the occasion of Beethoven’s composing
his pot-boiler, Wellington’s Victory, sometimes called ‘Battle Symphony’.
That was composed in a hurry on hearing the news that Napoleon’s army
in Spain, led by the emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, had been
defeated in June, 1813, by the Duke of Wellington.
In this piece Beethoven signaled the entrance of the British troops
onto the field by incorporating into the score God Save The King
and Rule Britannia. With these, even the least sophisticated listeners
easily get the message.
This served as a precedent for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, composed
much later and which also celebrates a defeat of Napoleon and his armies.
The aforementioned critic Wieck wasn’t the only listener who thought
Beethoven’s symphonies sounded wild and shocking. The French
composer Hector Berlioz said that a colleague of his had attended
a Beethoven symphony while in Vienna and was walking up the aisle
utterly bewildered. In fact, he felt so bewildered that when he went to
put his hat on his head, he could not find his head.
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Although Beethoven was disappointed by Napoleon, he always
admired heroes and also composed works to praise people of courage
in their fight for independence. One such was the hero of Goethe’s
historical drama, Egmont, for which Beethoven wrote the incidental music.
The Flemish hero Count Egmont fought valiantly during the
16th century to free the Netherlands from the occupying Spaniards,
led by the Duke of Alba. This is a great fact to know and let drop during
intermission – people today haven’t heard of any of these things.
The great German poet Goethe and Beethoven admired each other.
Goethe once told him: “With our artistic achievements we have both
achieved immortality. Because of what we have created, we will be
remembered forever.”
Perhaps that was talking too soon. Today everyone all over the world
has heard Beethoven’s music all of their lives, whereas few read Goethe –
have you?
Goethe made another mistake: he agreed with the composer in his
egalitarian attitudes but pleaded with him to do the acts of courtesy
that wouldn’t necessarily be seen as an abandonment of principle.
The empress and her party happened to be approaching from across
the plaza at that very moment and Goethe begged him to be reasonable
and remove his hat as they passed. Beethoven didn’t do it.
We have to say something now about Beethoven’s one opera, Fidelio.
It is not an opera to which you should take the young or the inexperienced
opera-goer. It is long and heavy. It is not surprising he only wrote one.
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The story of this opera appealed to him as it concerned yet another
brave man, Florestan, and his faithful wife Leonora, resisting a powerful
tyrant. Beethoven, knew he was having problems with Fidelio because
he composed three overtures for it, Leonore Overtures 1, 2, and 3,
and only with his fourth effort found what he was willing to use
to introduce his opera.
In an effort to make the opera more dramatic, one orchestra conductor
decided to have his trumpeter go off stage and play his part on cue from
the wings, coming even closer the second time. To that conductor’s
embarrassment, when the time arrived, the trumpet was silent. It was silent
again after the cue for the repetition.
Afterwards, offstage, the furious conductor asked the player why he
had failed to come in. The unhappy trumpeter explained that just as he
raised the trumpet to blow, a burly stage-hand had rushed over and ripped
the trumpet from his hands. “You can’t play that here,” he hissed.
“There’s a concert going on!”
(Note: this happens to horn players. On another occasion, the famous
horn-player of the London Symphony, Barry Tuckwell, was sent to play
an offstage horn-call; the conductor, Andre Previn, asked for him to go
further, then further again; finally there came “the most ethereal sound
he had ever heard, absolutely perfect for that moment in the score.”
But when he waited for it to be played again, sound came there none.
A couple of minutes later, an out-of-breath Tuckwell came rushing in:
the search for the perfect sound had backed him into an open elevator;
then someone on a lower level had pressed the button.)
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Beethoven, the rebel and nonconformist, was also Catholic and
a very moral man. He considered his sister-in-law a loose woman
(he referred to her as ‘The Queen of the Night’, after the character in
Mozart’s The Magic Flute) and after his brother’s death took over
the upbringing of his nephew. It was an unhappy situation with such a
strong uncle and such a weak boy. The young man tried to take his own
life when he was sixteen. A great grief for Beethoven.
Beethoven’s moral standards were applied to music as well as to life.
He believed that the role of art was to uplift and elevate, and if it failed to
do this it wasn’t really art.
He even expressed himself in the strongest terms on the subject of
Mozart’s Don Giovanni – he was appalled that such magnificent music
should be employed to accompany the story of a wretched cad –
even though, as we pointed out earlier, none of Casanova’s techniques of
seduction are actually illustrated in the piece.
We now have to deal with his love life. Among Beethoven’s papers
was found another of those letters which we assume he sent and kept
the copy, or perhaps not – we do not know. This letter was addressed to
someone he called his “Immortal Beloved.” Out of discretion he did not
put a name on the letter and for over a century and a half no one knew
who it may have been.
Posterity is so curious about the love life of great men that endless
speculation has been spent on this and the names of almost every woman
with whom Beethoven ever came in contact have been suggested.
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However, today, thanks to some sophisticated detective work with
exact dates and poking around among the police records of those staying
in hotels at the time, we can be reasonably sure who she was.
The lady was Antonia Brentano, the charming, musical wife of
a banker, one of Beethoven’s friends and supporters.
It appears that from a social friendship Beethoven and Antonia had
fallen in love with each other and due to Beethoven’s respect for the fact
that she was married to a friend, and she being an honorable woman
in any case, they renounced their love and ceased to see each other.
This kind of thing certainly doesn’t add up to much for voyeuristic fans
and historians. There is nothing salacious or immoral in this, and so
the whole business will no doubt cease to excite interest.
We are left with the fact that he seems to have blamed his deafness
on some youthful indiscretions for which he thought he might be
being punished.
In fact, Beethoven’s deafness was due to a condition that can easily
be cured today – the bones of the ear growing too close and blocking
the channel.
However, the conventional wisdom is that being cut off from the world
and the music of other composers was very important to the development
of Beethoven’s own originality, and had he had normal hearing he
might never have become the unique master he was.
This was a little bit like Haydn’s being stranded in the countryside
out of ear-shot of other people’s music.
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One writer once questioned whether Beethoven tried to establish
a relationship with God (people will say anything – that person had
evidently never heard the Ninth Symphony or the Missa Solemnis).
Other things one should know about Beethoven includes the fact that
he moved lodging dozens of times in Vienna and, however annoying and
uncomfortable that may have been at the time, it has given tourism a boost
as dozens of people today can claim that he lived in their building
and charge for showing you his rooms.
Beethoven was consistent in being a rebel and a fighter to the last.
It was said that when the many ailments that afflicted him finally
got the better of him and he had slipped into coma, a fierce thunderstorm
blew in over Vienna.
There was one peal of thunder that was so intense it shook the rafters.
It awakened Beethoven, who rose up and, raising his face to the heavens,
shook his clenched fist in the direction of the loud blast, then sank back
onto his pillow and died. You can believe this if you like.
As for his music: what you really need to know is that his compositions
fall into ‘Early’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Late Beethoven’.
Everyone prefers and plays Middle Beethoven, but they pretend
to prefer Late Beethoven.
No-one prefers Early Beethoven over the other two because it
just sounds like Haydn or bad Mozart.
This is a very hard thing to deal with, as in preferring Middle Beethoven
you condemn yourself to being a non-expert.
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But it is probably worth it, because with Middle Beethoven you get
the Appassionata Sonata, the Emperor Concerto, the Violin Concerto,
and many, many other of those works that fulminate with magnificent,
turbulent, up-lifting sounds that only Beethoven could make.
Who wants to be introverted and esoteric, anyway? (Stravinsky
limited his musical interests in the last years of his life exclusively to
the private study of Beethoven’s late string quartets, which he claimed
contained everything – but we are not Stravinsky).
But it is better to keep these thoughts to yourself.
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FRANZ SCHUBERT
(1797 – 1828)
It is customary to believe that in going into music the great composers
were: a) opposed by their parents, b) unappreciated during their lifetime,
and c) they died young. As we have seen, this was far from the rule.
However, ALL these three factors
were present in Franz Schubert’s life,
which is where this legend may have
started. His life has given all fathers,
all
contemporary
audiences
and
all
medicine a bad name.
Granted, at least three of those we call
“great” composers died young, but hardly
any were unappreciated in their time,
and for a number of them it was the
family business.
Schubert’s father had founded a small school as a private business
and he expected his sons to work in the school and carry on with it.
He had done this during the period of economic depression that followed
the Napoleonic wars and he deserves a great deal of credit for finding
a way to support his family while the country was in deep recession.
These were difficult times: Franz was born in 1797, just at the end of
the French Revolution, and would die in 1828, only fifteen years after
Napoleon stopped attacking Austria and was finally sent off to St. Helena.
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This is a period that the in-crowd calls the “Biedermeier” Period,
because of the furniture. This is definitely a thing to know.
As a child, Schubert, like Joseph Haydn before him, was accepted into
the choir of the Royal Chapel, or Vienna Boy’s Choir as we call it today.
There he not only received an education, but a thorough grounding
in music. When he left the choir, as all boys did when their voices broke,
he, like Haydn, also went to live with his friends. This was to avoid
having to teach at his father’s school.
Living with your friends is an occupational hazard of being a musician,
as noted earlier.
Unlike Haydn, however, he did not grasp at the opportunities offered
by working for an aristocratic patron in the summer months. He tried this
and didn’t like it – even when the family was (as usual) the Esterházy
family. He hated being employed – even such a pleasant job as being a
summer teacher at the country estates of the Esterházys.
Even Beethoven would take this kind of summer job, as long as he was
treated like a guest. During these periods in a country manor house
they could make friends, a few thalers, and have their music heard.
But Schubert only did this once.
Here we have to say something about the Esterházy family.
Anyone would think, reading this account, that we were putting in
the name Esterházy as a sort of generic term for generous, aristocratic
arts patrons. Not at all. Each time it is actually the same Esterházy family,
and they will crop up again.
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To be fair to Schubert, his head was so full of music that he was an
appalling teacher and of little use in his father’s school; so he spent his life
in coffee houses and other night spots where he ended by contracting
syphilis, which was the major reason for his early death, although typhoid
seems to have helped.
During his short life he composed over five hundred musical settings of
outstanding poems – many by Goethe, who hated the idea.
He also did this with many, many poems by Wilhelm Mueller and
Heinrich Heine, but fewer and fewer people have heard of these poems –
let alone read them – although those who enjoy these songs have heard
of them because of Schubert, of course.
This is important:
To pass as a musical expert you must call these ‘lieder’, speak about
them in a hushed voice and hide the fact that you don’t understand
a word of German and have no idea what the singer, however famous,
is on about.
You also have to know that Schubert’s unique contribution to music
was evolving the piano accompaniments of these songs into an equal
partnership between pianist and singer in the creation of miniature
musical dramas, and it takes an excellent pianist to do it.
Now, if you don’t understand German, but you are intrigued by this
music, it is strongly advised that you listen to the piano solo arrangements
made of a number of these by Franz Liszt.
But this is another of the things to which you should never admit.
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Schubert composed twenty piano sonatas, but to sound like an expert
you need only mention being an enthusiast of the last three – all of which
are very long, very beautiful, and permeated with an aura of death.
He also composed chamber music and nine symphonies –
symphonies there was no one to play. A couple of his really great
symphonies were given a run-through by his friends with an amateur
orchestra, but were otherwise totally unknown until some time after
his death. The greatest of all, the ninth, now known as “The Great”,
was discovered by a young Robert Schumann in a musty old library
when he was still a student.
Schubert would compose at an amazing rate and play his works for
his groups of friends. In historical hindsight, these gatherings have become
known as Schubertiades.
Other than living off his friends and being a poor syphilitic,
Schubert was a lovable, dear, short-sighted fellow who endeared himself
to everyone who knew him, and his music is beautiful, timeless and
moving, but often suggestive of the presence of death.
He was shy, and although he saw Beethoven occasionally in Vienna,
a very small town at that time, he never dared speak to him.
However, he was a pall-bearer in his funeral procession.
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The Romantic Era and the Piano
SCHUMANN, MENDELSSOHN, CHOPIN and LISZT
This era is for those who love just plain beautiful music. Most people
are ashamed to tell anyone this.
It is also for those who prefer piano music to any other kind.
By an extraordinary quirk of fate these four pianist-composers
were all born within an eighteen-month span: 1809 – 11.
They all knew each other and were close friends, they all composed
principally for the piano, they were all exceptionally attractive,
and they were all exceptionally nice people.
Further, their youth coincided with the development of the modern
piano. For them, the new piano was something like the computer is for the
young today. It was new technology and it opened up a broad horizon for
the imagination.
With them came the development of virtuoso piano technique,
piano repertoire, the piano recital and the pianist as superstar.
In other ways they were not at all alike. Although they were friends,
their personalities were very contrasting and they came from totally
different worlds.
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We have already mentioned Robert Schumann (1810 – 56) and his
marriage to Clara in our section on critics. He was German – born in
a Saxon town called Zwickau.
As we know, he would cripple his
hand, and his piano works were
made known to the world by his
wife and by his friend Franz Liszt,
as we shall see.
Robert
Schumann
came
to
music late, through no fault of his
own. His father, an author and
publisher, was not opposed to his
son’s musicality and encouraged
him as a child, but he died young,
and Schumann was forced to
cooperate with his widowed mother, who insisted that he study law –
just as Handel’s father had demanded (everybody who had any pretensions
in society studied law in those days).
He followed legal studies in Leipzig to please his mother, but hated it;
he began to associate with musicians and furthermore to study music
with that old grouch we mentioned earlier, Friedrich Wieck, the father of
the Clara he was to marry.
After further efforts at law in Heidelberg he threw in the towel;
he told his mother that he had been assured by Wieck of his talent and that
he was going to devote himself to becoming a concert pianist.
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We have already seen what happened with that. He damaged his hand,
was thrown out by Wieck, and was forced to continue as a composer only.
We should explain here what he did to his hand as you will then be
something of an expert on piano playing:
Not understanding that the fourth finger is hampered by being attached
to the fifth at the base, he thought he could give this weakest finger
strength and independence by straining it. He tied a string to his finger
from a contraption above, so that every time he used it he would pull
against it. This did not strengthen the fourth finger – it destroyed its
ligaments. This was probably Wieck’s fault for not explaining his hand
and how to use it correctly. No piano student has tried this since.
Clara played his music, however, as well as giving him eight children
and nursing him through his bouts of melancholia until his mind gave way.
We already explained how they managed to marry in the chapter on
Music Critics.
Schumann’s early – and most characteristic – works are for the piano,
and much of it comprises collections of very short ‘character pieces’
grouped under names such as Carnaval, Kreisleriana, Fantasiestücke,
Etudes Symphoniques or Papillons.
For the normal listener these are almost incomprehensible as all the
segments run together in what sounds to the non-expert like a great, long,
pianistic jumble. You must never inadvertently let anyone know this is
how they sound to you! In any case, it takes a truly remarkable pianist
to make these clear, and in lesser hands they really do fall into a jumble.
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Of course, if pianists paused for a moment or two between all these
pieces to indicate where one stopped and the next began it would be quite
different, but for some reason the same great, faceless, nameless authority
that tells us not to clap between movements forbids this.
Mind you, it takes a really outstanding interpreter to make sense of
these, anyway, as they are abrupt, quirky, and sometimes a bit sappy
even when played well.
The best solution is to look wise and say you prefer his masterwork
the Fantasy in C major, a monumental piece anyone can enjoy, and which
he quite understandably dedicated to Franz Liszt.
Franz Liszt, whom we will visit soon, did his very best to promote
his friend’s music, but found that he got less applause when he played
the Carnaval than when he played his own compositions. Rather than
trying the pauses between micro-pieces, he would add his own dash to
Schumann’s music, which, though it infuriated Clara, not only got him all
the applause he could have hoped for, but the audiences seemed to like it.
Then he went one better and made his own arrangements of
Schumann’s music – one such is Liszt’s piano arrangement of Schumann’s
song Widmung, or “Dedication”, which is fabulous.
Schumann wrote many songs, and later four symphonies, encouraged
by Felix Mendelssohn, who we will also discuss shortly. His most popular
work, however, is the piano concerto he wrote for his wife. There is
a movie about this with Katherine Hepburn and Paul Henried called
Song of Love, which puts it all in a charming perspective.
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During his career as composer and journalist Schumann met and
befriended all the musicians of his time and wrote about them
in his magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. An unusual critic, he was
generous as well as perceptive, and never stingy in his praise.
All musical experts know that perhaps the most famous quote from
this journal was when he first saw music by the then unknown Chopin and
wrote a review with a headline that said “Hats off Gentlemen – a Genius!”
Schumann, like Chopin, was only twenty-one at the time, which shows
how perceptive he was, recognizing a genius from nothing but
a printed score and no advance marketing men.
Another thing one must know about Schumann was that his
mental instability, which was to destroy him, began gently, giving him
the impression of having two distinct and independent personalities.
He was fond of these, giving them names and whole personalities:
one was pensive – ‘Eusebius’; the other tempestuous – “Florestan”.
He wrote his piano pieces as if by one or the other – which explains why
his pieces are either pensive or tempestuous with not much middle ground.
He also frequently signed newspaper articles by one or the other.
In character they were rather like Good Cop and Bad Cop.
Schumann’s friends not only included Mendelssohn and Liszt,
but many others whom he helped. The most famous of these was young
Johannes Brahms, who came to his door as a young composer of twenty,
and who became his lodger and his friend. Brahms helped their family
when Schumann was ill and also fell in love with Clara.
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This attachment between and Clara Schumann – his elder by
fourteen years – has fascinated the historical voyeur almost as much as
Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, as we shall see.
As noted earlier, Schumann died in a mental hospital – where,
tragically, he committed himself for his last two years, refusing to see
Clara. Only Brahms came to visit him regularly. Poor Clara did not know
what to make of this. He was deeply mourned by all his friends.
Next we come to Schumann’s – in fact just about everyone’s – friend,
Felix Mendelssohn:
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FELIX MENDELSSOHN
(1809 – 47)
Unique
among the great composers, Mendelssohn’s family was
immensely rich and he grew up with everything that money could buy.
Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg in 1809. He died at age thirty-eight
in 1847 in Leipzig, thus being, with Chopin and Schubert, one of those
composers who did, in fact, die young.
Someone once said, “What great music
he could have composed had he only
been poor and miserable!”
That music is produced by misery
is one of those annoying myths that will
not go away. It is your role as an expert
to point out that some of the most robust
and happiest music was composed at
times when we know the composer was
ill or unhappy. Beethoven is an example
of this, but Mozart also and many others.
After all, these were professionals.
Great music, as opposed to third-rate efforts, is neither self-serving nor
self-concerned. It is inspired by a variety of superior emotions, such as
piety, romantic love, patriotism, or just by the idea of sheer beauty.
This is true even when the music has been commissioned and the
composer ill or unhappy – or just a well trained artist.
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When there are no higher emotions there is no music. Today we see
a clear manifestation of this. (Now, this is a really good thing to say if
you want to energize the conversation at a dinner party.)
That Mendelssohn was both rich and happy is beyond dispute.
His father, Abraham, was a wealthy banker and his celebrated grandfather
was the much admired Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Moses
was the scholar on whom Lessing based a famous play, Nathan the Wise –
the playwright and the protagonist were close friends.
Moses’ banker son, Abraham, once remarked that he had first been
known as his famous father’s son, then when Felix became celebrated,
he became known as his son’s father. “I am a hyphen between the two.”
Felix grew up in a large home with servants, tutors and a loving family.
He was especially close to his sister, Fanny, who was also exceptionally
gifted. She played the piano beautifully and was a competent composer
herself. When, in her thirties, she suddenly took ill and died, Felix
suffered a similar stroke on hearing the news; he went into a rapid decline
from which he never recovered.
This has always been told as a touching story in evidence that they
were deeply devoted to each other, but today modern medicine judges that
they both suffered from the same physical weakness.
When children, their parents were extremely supportive and could
afford to provide a small orchestra to perform at Sunday afternoon musical
parties in the family garden. Both of them performed with the orchestra,
often music composed by Felix.
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At sixteen he composed two works that remain favorites in the
repertoire to this day and are typical of all his music: the Overture to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Octet For Strings.
Sixteen years after the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Mendelssohn received a royal commission for music to go with a
performance of the Shakespeare play. This gave him the opportunity
to add the rest of the music, which is known as ‘Incidental Music
to A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and which includes the familiar
Wedding March.
It is often a surprise to those who hear this much played wedding march
to learn it was composed for fairies.
Felix Mendelssohn’s grandfather, the writer and philosopher,
had urged the Jewish community to integrate themselves into the culture
of the countries in which they lived after centuries in ghettos.
He postulated that the time had come for them to familiarize themselves
with the artistic and scientific literature of the contemporary world, and
to begin to integrate with the wider community.
Abraham, Felix’s father, took this a step further. Instead of merely
integrating, he chose the path of assimilation and had his family converted
to Christianity.
They all became Lutherans, but in order not to offend other members
of the Mendelssohn family, he added ‘Bartholdy’ to their name.
One must not be confused by seeing the composer’s name written
‘Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’ on older music and LPs.
111
The next important fact to know about Mendelssohn is that it was he
who revived and restored the music of Johann Sebastian Bach
after many decades of neglect.
For two generations the only works of Bach with which most musicians
were familiar had been his Preludes and Fugues, used in training
keyboard performance.
Once young Felix’s curiosity and interest was piqued concerning
Bach’s great choral music, nothing would content him until he had
convinced his family to get him copies of these long lost and neglected
manuscripts.
Not content with that, he wanted to put on performances of this music.
At one of his youthful garden parties he conducted Bach’s The Passion
of Our Lord According to St. Matthew (the “St. Matthew Passion”).
Then, wanting a public performance of this work, he overcame
many difficulties to achieve it.
This was a very expensive project. He was determined, however,
and the resulting performance in Berlin had an enormous impact. “It was
a great day in the history of music”, said his overcome sister Fanny.
A friend, the actor Édouard Devrienne, helped him with this arduous
production, which included financial difficulties and the need to copy
the scores for each member of a large body of musicians and singers.
Édouard said, “Isn’t it strange that it took an actor (actors were not
considered respectable at that time) and a Jew to bring back this most
Christian work of music?”
112
Most people of the period were totally unaware of Bach’s monumental
role. They had no idea of his enormous output or the superlative quality
of his work.
It was Mendelssohn who followed his success with the St. Matthew
by organizing an international search involving eight countries and
a huge sum of money, finally putting together the scattered work of
the German master. It fills an entire room in the building where it is
housed and it is estimated that it represents only fifty percent of
Bach’s output.
The other fifty percent could never be found (as mentioned earlier,
this was probably due to Bach’s son who drank, losing or selling
the music).
Now we must get to the voyeuristic part of his private life, as everyone
always wants to know the scandals and love affairs of great men.
The closest we can get to this with Mendelssohn was the fact that
he had all his friends whispering about the fact he called so very often
on a beautiful lady by the name of Mme. Jeanrenaud, widow of a
Huguenot Protestant clergyman.
Disappointingly, however, this came to nothing as a scandal, because
it was announced that he was engaged to the seventeen year-old daughter
of Mme Jeanrenaud. He married Cecile and not only were they very happy
together but produced a family of five.
In everything – from the even quality of his music, to his friends and
his marriage, it seems he was just always really nice.
113
Mendelssohn was appointed conductor of the only regular standing
orchestra in Europe, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (“Gewandhaus”,
which experts say with a flourish, and with such an air of knowledge,
actually means “Cloth Guild Hall”).
From this position as one of the first orchestral conductors, he not only
developed the art and techniques used by future conductors, but also
introduced the music of composers he knew, such as his friend Schumann.
Another good anecdote to know is the following: while on a trip to
Paris, he and Frederic Chopin decided to perform a joint recital.
(We should say here that the word “recital” had heretofore applied only
to those who recited poems or dramatic prose; it was coined as a musical
term by their friend Franz Liszt to describe his own solo performances.
These were the first in which a pianist would play a whole programme
by himself. Up until that time all performances would consist of a
mixed programme with singers and others taking turns.)
To continue: Mendelssohn and Chopin prepared their music with
Chopin doing his best to show Mendelssohn how to do trills properly.
They had invitations prepared, but when they came to perform they found
to their dismay that no one had come. No one except a few penniless Poles
whom Chopin had run into in a favourite coffee shop.
Mendelssohn dashed off to the Rothschilds, who were having a grand
dinner party at their smart new hôtel particulier at 15 rue Lafitte, off
Rue Lafayette (where you can still go shopping in the Galéries Lafayette
near the Opéra), and begged everyone to come along.
114
Later, Chopin found all the invitations on his desk, as he had forgotten
to mail them.
The English, who had no composers of their own, but who have always
loved choral music, took a great liking to Mendelssohn as they had done
with Handel, the ‘London Bach’, and Haydn.
He became a firm favorite and friend of Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert, with whom he would stay every year at Windsor Castle, ten years
in a row.
You see, Prince Albert was very different from other members of
the Saxe-Coburg Gotha family to which he belonged. For one thing,
he was an excellent musician and pianist and the three of them
would entertain each other with duets and songs in the evenings.
Prince Albert went on to found the Royal College of Music and
was responsible for the Royal Albert Hall – as its name suggests.
(It has often been rumoured that Prince Albert was actually the son of
the Jewish tutor, the lover of his mother, Princess of Saxe-Coburg Gotha,
whose turbulent marriage ended in divorce when Albert was five;
this would explain a lot.)
To complete the story: Princess Victoria was supposed to choose
Albert’s elder brother Ernest as her consort and everyone was somewhat
surprised and disconcerted that she chose Albert.
The Queen – who was, after all, virtually German herself –
would refer to Mendelssohn as “a model English gentleman” because of
his refined manners, his moderation in all things, and his modesty.
115
This is what is known as British reasoning.
After his early death, the British musical community established
the Mendelssohn Fellowship at The Royal Academy of Music. It was to be
awarded to the most promising young composer in the United Kingdom.
The winner would then receive the funds to go to Leipzig to study
at the conservatory that Mendelssohn had founded.
Most people, when told the name of the British student in composition
awarded the first grant, are surprised.
The winner was Arthur Sullivan, who later was to join William Gilbert
in that series of light operas that include HMS Pinafore, Pirates of
Penzance and the Mikado.
But when he was young – in fact, all his life – Sullivan wanted and
intended to compose serious music. He did, indeed, begin his career with
a dramatic operatic treatment of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (this is a
great fact to know, as it is not only a forgotten opera, but the music is too),
and his serious efforts never took off as did his Gilbert and Sullivan
operettas.
Sullivan would later be irritated by his success with the G & S shows,
as he had wanted to be known as someone with musical solidity when
he set out for Leipzig in the middle of the 19th century. There, he found
himself in the same class as a pleasant young Norwegian, who turned out
to be Edvard Grieg.
Grieg had more luck with his serious compositions, but the friendship
was a lasting one.
116
Here is a more recent anecdote about Mendelssohn:
In 1937, Sir Thomas Beecham took the London Phiharmonic to Leipzig
to pay tribute to Mendelssohn. You will remember from our earlier chapter
on conductors that Sir Thomas thought himself very clever by not staying
in England during the war.
Nor, as you will see, did he size up Hitler with any degree of accuracy,
thinking a glib verbal put-down of “the old boy” sufficient.
They were scheduled to play in Mendelssohn’s old venue at the
Gewandhaus. After the concert was over, the plan called for a ceremony
outside the building, where a floral wreath would be placed on the pedestal
of a large bronze statue of the composer. This would be accompanied
by some appropriate speeches.
The concert went off very well and earned long drawn-out applause
from the listeners. When the cheering came to an end, they all went
outside to place the flowers on the base of the statue of Mendelssohn,
but to their amazement it was gone.
This was 1937, and during the concert Brown Shirts had removed
the statue and hacked it to bits. Despite his family’s conversion to
Lutheranism, Mendelssohn was very much still regarded as a Jew in
Nazi Germany.
117
FREDERIC CHOPIN
(1810 – 49)
One must not be fooled by the fact everyone says Chopin was ‘Polish’.
His father was French, his name was French and he lived his entire
mature life – that is to say, from the age of twenty-one until his untimely
death at thirty-nine – in France.
Chopin is considered Polish, however, because his mother was
of an aristocratic Polish family, because he was born in Poland, and
because he always thought of Poland as home.
More importantly, however, Chopin is considered a ‘Polish’ composer
because his music is suffused with Polish themes, harmonies, rhythms
and an elusive, unique bittersweet
nostalgia the Poles call ‘żal’ –
all of which is true.
However, it is also elegant,
precise,
refined,
clever
and
unexpected – which is French.
He is therefore unique in being
both – and neither – Polish and
French.
Furthermore,
as
France
nor
have
Poland
neither
ever
produced a composer anything like
him it leads one to suppose that it took a blend of both nations’ traits
to create this one-of-a-kind genius.
118
Chopin was born in a charming country place near Warsaw called
Żelazowa Wola (never try to pronounce this) and he grew up in Warsaw.
His
ambition
to
develop
a
virtuoso technique was fired on
hearing the legendary Italian violinist
Paganini
on
tour
in
Poland.
Paganini promoted his performances
by allowing it to be believed he
had sold his soul to the devil
for his astonishing skill at playing
the violin. He wore black and
grew his hair long – he was the
first great self-promoter in music.
He gathered huge crowds in arenas like the Three Tenors did in our time.
Further down you will see who else had the Paganini experience.
Interestingly,
Chopin’s
unique
and
quite
revolutionary
ideas
about piano playing technique and his likewise unique harmonies were
the result of having two supportive teachers who did not know how
to play themselves. One was a violinist who could play the organ,
but not the piano – Adalbert Żywny (don’t try to pronounce this either);
the other left him alone and allowed him to ignore he required courses
in orchestral composition at the conservatory in Warsaw – Joseph Elsner.
During his short life, Chopin exponentially developed the virtuoso’s
use of the hand at the keyboard, postulated in his Twenty-Four Etudes –
it is the “technique” that all great pianists need to know.
119
Chopin left Warsaw to seek fame and fortune, first in Vienna and
then in Paris. This was almost impossible, for the political climate of
the time had made it difficult for any Pole. Warsaw was occupied by
Russians and the country partitioned between other European powers
(does this sound familiar?).
Twenty years old, Chopin found himself leaving Vienna en route to
Paris and London, thinking perhaps he should consider going to New York
(people thought this way even in 1830).
However, at the urging of a family friend, the head of the Polish
community in Paris, Prince Czartoryski, he stayed in Paris long enough
to meet the dashing Franz Liszt, whom we will get to know better soon.
Even at the age of twenty, Liszt was considered a star who created
despair among all pianists and desperation among the ladies.
Always princely in his generosity, Liszt was the first to recognize
the timeless, rare charm and beauty of his new friend’s music; he also
quickly adapted to himself the brilliant new ideas Chopin had developed
for playing the piano. Liszt introduced him to everyone in Paris.
After that it was a love affair between Chopin and the city’s high
society. This was all during the reign of Louis Philippe, the ‘Citizen King’.
Unlike Franz Liszt, Chopin did not like playing in public; but he did
like going into society, keeping his own carriage, and wearing expensive
glacé gloves and elegant clothes. He made a living by teaching countesses
and princesses, who would leave a Louis d’or on his mantelpiece after
their lesson, and by publishing his music.
120
Chopin was pleased that Franz Liszt wanted to perform his music –
as long as he added no fancy runs – and when he dedicated his Etudes to
him, he said he could “assomer les gens.”
Now this is a pun, because in French ‘assomer’ means to ‘stun’, but
it can also mean to ‘bore,’ so we think he understood his friend very well
and enjoyed teasing him.
The kind of friends and supporters Chopin made among the aristocratic
women who studied piano with him is exemplified by the events of
his last year of life.
One of Chopin’s students was a remarkable Scottish lady, the sister of
Lord Torpichen of Stirling, the family of Stirling Castle.
This impressive lady, Jane Stirling, seeing him depressed and
wishing to broaden his horizons – shortly before his death at the age of
thirty-nine – organized a trip for him to England and Scotland.
Although he was universally admired, he did not take to life away from
Paris, and returned there, very weak and ill with aggravated lung disease.
Understanding his predicament, Jane Stirling sent a very large sum
of gold to Chopin’s apartment in the Place Vendôme (this apartment
is opposite the present-day Ritz Hotel and you can visit it today).
This was for his sister to use for whatever he might need –
his sister having come to Paris on hearing how ill he had become.
However, as no one who knows Paris will be surprised to hear, the
concierge kept the package. It was only when Miss Stirling wrote to see if
the package had been received that it was traced, found and the gift used.
121
The sum was so large that it not only paid Chopin’s last bills, but it
paid for a tremendous funeral mass at the Madeleine, for the famous
singers who sang the Mozart Requiem, for his burial in the Père Lachaise
cemetery (where you can see his grave today – always covered with
flowers) – and for sending his heart to the Cathedral in Krakόw, as he
had asked for it to be sent (you can see that place, too).
One is also supposed to know all about Chopin’s celebrated nine-year
liaison with a very tedious divorcée known as George Sand – a pseudonym
for her real name, Aurore Dudevant.
Unlike the way in which she is depicted in movies, such as A Song to
Remember, Sand was somewhat plump, five foot nothing, had a big nose,
smelt of tobacco and was some six years older than Chopin. She wrote
uniquely boring books in which she pictured herself the heroine cast in
various disguises with various romantic sounding names.
Not surprisingly, Chopin did not like her at first.
However, she was persistent and he grew to care for her. She also had
a lovely country house, called Nohant, to which she invited many
celebrated artists for weeks at a time in the summer.
(This house can be visited today, and presents recitals of his music.)
This tiresome woman quarreled with Chopin shortly before his death –
they separated and only glimpsed each other once or twice before his
death.
For Chopin, who was ill, and who thought of Sand and her children as
family, this was bitter.
122
To explain:
Solange had married the talented but somewhat ham-fisted sculptor
Jean Clésinger, whose temper and debts had quelled Sand’s initial
enthusiasm for him, to say the least. After a flaming row with her mother
at Nohant over his spending and their finances, Solange had written to
Chopin in Paris to ask for the use of his carriage in order to leave.
Innocently, he had said yes.
As Sand had spent most of her adult life living with various artists,
she should have known that they were difficult and never had money
of their own. In any case, she accused Chopin of disloyalty over the matter
of the carriage and abruptly ended their eight-year friendship.
But, in fact, George had been growing tired of Chopin for some time
and had written a roman à clef in which he was depicted, under a very thin
disguise, as cold and distant, and herself as passionate and ill-used.
She was really a pill.
As an expert, you will note that the graceful monument with the
grieving muse that stands guard over his grave in the Père Lachaise
cemetery was sculpted by Clésinger; we also owe him the plaster cast of
Chopin’s hand, which is of interest to all pianists.
Chopin’s youthful love had been a nice Polish girl of very good family,
Marie Wodźinska, to whom he considered himself engaged – an
engagement ended by her family when it seemed clear he was tubercular.
We know all about this because he kept all her letters, found in his desk
after his death, tied with a pink ribbon, and labeled, in Polish, My Sorrow.
123
Chopin wrote almost exclusively for the piano. However, his wit and
reserve caused him to publish all his music – the most speaking and poetic
ever composed – under abstract names, such as Préludes, Etudes,
Ballades, Scherzos, Mazurkas and Polonaises.
For this reason it often seems as if musicians are speaking in a secret
code when they refer to the “G minor Ballade” or the “A flat Polonaise”
or the “E major Etude”, and know something that you don’t.
However, some of his pieces have acquired names with time, as if they
had broken out from behind their opus numbers: the “Raindrop Prelude”,
the “Revolutionary Etude”, the “Heroic Polonaise”, the “Aeolian Harp
Etude”, the “Ocean Wave Etude”, or the “Winter Wind Etude”.
And it would have probably annoyed him a little.
A good quote for the expert to know concerning Chopin is Schumann’s
description of his music: he said it was like “cannon buried beneath roses.”
Quoting this will certainly attest to your knowledge and is, in fact,
a very good description of his music.
During his final illness many of Chopin’s friends came to see him and
play for him, and after his death Liszt wrote a touching book about him.
But then, Liszt was one of the very nicest people in the history of
music.
124
FRANZ LISZT
(1811 – 86)
Liszt
was
Hungarian.
His
family worked for the Esterházys
(as
explained
earlier,
the
name
Esterházy crops up continually –
we remember them from Haydn’s
career and Schubert’s summer holiday;
so many musicians were the recipients
of the generosity of the Esterházys
that you can easily become confused).
The Esterházys felt that it was their
responsibility to see that this amazingly beautiful boy with genius fingers
should have a proper training and they put together a fund with other
members of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy to send him, accompanied
by his father, to Vienna, where he could study with Czerny.
Yes, that is the same Czerny who wrote all those boring exercises.
Czerny took young Liszt to meet his own master, Beethoven – already
very grumpy – but Liszt pleased him very much by playing a piece of
his own and transposing a Bach Prelude and Fugue, which we assume
he was able to hear, despite his deafness.
Liszt was eleven years old at this time, and performed in Vienna’s
Redoutensaal. Beethoven forgave him for being a child prodigy
(he disliked them as a breed) – and, reportedly, embraced him.
125
Liszt repaid Beethoven by making sure that his music did not go
out of style with the coming of a new generation of musicians.
In fact, in later life Liszt made piano transcriptions – solo and duet
versions – of all of Beethoven’s symphonies, so that those in the
provinces, far from any orchestra, could get to know them.
He also paid for the very costly statue of Beethoven in Bonn
when everyone else who had promised financial help fell through.
From Vienna Liszt went to Paris. There he found that the French
were already the rather difficult, bureaucratic people we know them to be,
and would not allow him to enter the Paris Conservatoire because
he was not born in France.
The French have been sorry for this ever since, as without their help
he became the world’s leading pianist from that day to this;
the great innovator, performer, composer, teacher and all-round good guy
of 19th century music, and they cannot claim him in any way.
They take their revenge in always mispronouncing his name ‘Liets’ –
and even mis-spelling it as ‘Litz’ on occasion (there is a street in Paris
named after him spelt in this way!).
He stayed in Paris, which had once again become the center of the art
world after the effects of the Napoleonic Wars had somewhat worn off,
and he began to be famous when still very young.
However, in his teens Liszt was thrown into a great depression.
He had fallen desperately in love with one of his piano students,
a sixteen year-old girl, the daughter of a distinguished family.
126
Her parents quite understandably would not hear of an engagement –
after all, they were still children and he was as yet only a penniless
Hungarian pianist, albeit a dashing and handsome one.
And, of course, the girl’s father soon arranged for her to marry a
titled young man.
As a result, he gave it all up and decided to study for the priesthood.
Fortunately for him – and the Church – before this came to anything
he heard Paganini, the great violinist (does this sound familiar?).
That did it – he threw over all notions of Holy Orders and decided to do
for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. In a way, we owe
both Liszt and Chopin to Paganini. You will think of this when you hear
Liszt’s piano version of Paganini’s La Campanella or the Caprice #24
(“Paganini Etude No. 6”).
To be totally knowledgeable about
Liszt, you must know that he relented
in middle age and took Holy Orders
after all, becoming a Franciscan abbé
(a degree of priesthood taken by those
who are only going to teach) and spent
the last years of his life teaching
almost everyone and anybody who
asked, for free.
Before that happened, however,
he had quite a life.
127
His chief romance was with the wife of rather weak-kneed French
count: le Comte d’Agoult. The Comtesse, who was six years older than
young Liszt, was a woman who had her own money (always dangerous),
and who, like George Sand, wrote extremely boring books, calling herself
“Daniel Stern”.
This rather rapacious woman, Marie d’Agoult, and Liszt went off
together to live in Switzerland and had three children.
One of Liszt’s children would disappear into a respectable marriage;
another, Daniel, died at twenty while a law student in Vienna; and the
third became the famous Cosima Wagner, who left her husband, the
pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, to live with Richard Wagner.
They later married, but this was a huge scandal.
His daughter’s behaviour was a great embarrassment to Liszt, at this
point in Holy Orders, but he had not exactly given a good example and
it was the fashion in those days to throw everything up for a great love.
In those days people didn’t just “have sex” – they had great loves
as well. There is some kind of difference.
Liszt also tried to marry a young woman he met while touring in Russia
– the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-von Wittgenstein – but she was married
to another man, which was a real obstacle.
With time, however, she grew very eccentric: she also took to
cigar-smoking, never opened the windows and also wrote interminable and
boring books.
All these women seem to have done this kind of thing.
128
It is not possible to read the life of any composer of the 19th century
without finding that Franz Liszt was instrumental in their careers.
This is unique in the history of music.
His first effort was for Frederic Chopin when they were twenty and
twenty-one, when Liszt met Chopin, friendless, in Paris, as described
in the preceding chapter. However, this story is so charming that it is
worth telling in full and unlike so many of the much repeated anecdotes,
this one appears to be true:
The story goes that Chopin had given up on Paris but was convinced by
Prince Czartoryski to give it one more try. He went to see the Parisian
music publisher and manager, Camille Pleyel. There he was told to
sit and wait.
In came Liszt, saw music lying on a piano in the showroom and started
reading it off at sight. They say he turned to the depressed character
sitting against the wall and said,
“If this is yours come and shake my hand; I don’t want to stop playing
to come over there” – or words to that effect.
Liszt not only told Pleyel to publish his new friend’s music, but also
introduced him to at least thirty of the leading hostesses of fashionable
salons, in which he met everyone who mattered in Parisian society.
This was, in fact, a very big gift, and in return, Chopin repaid him
by showing him his Etudes and dedicating them to him. Chopin was glad
to show his friend his discoveries for virtuoso playing, for he disliked
performing in concerts himself, as we explained earlier.
129
That was Liszt’s first success at this type of friendship, but, as we will
see, there were so many after this – we have already mentioned Schumann,
and there would be countless others. There was no jealousy in Liszt.
You can therefore feel pretty safe when referring to any composer of
the 19th century in saying that he owed his career to Liszt.
During his long career Liszt not only composed an enormous amount of
music – including pioneering the orchestral Tone Poem as we described
in an earlier chapter – but virtually created the career of the touring
‘concert pianist’. Liszt went everywhere – from London to Lisbon,
St. Petersburg to Constantinople, Kiev to Rome (all by horse and carriage
which must have been quite bumpy).
Also, as we have already noted, he invented the solo piano “recital”,
and he initiated the custom of turning the piano sideways so that the raised
piano lid would send the music out into the hall. Jealous musicians said
that this was to show off his profile, but he was only being practical.
This arrangement had become necessary as ticket-buying events
became the custom on the stages of theatres and concert halls, rather than
in private ballrooms.
As time went along he felt he had neglected his Hungarian roots and
founded the music conservatory in Budapest as well as composing
Hungarian Rhapsodies.
All in all, he was thoroughly envied and complained about by legions
of jealous musicians and musicologists towards whom he felt no animosity
whatsoever.
130
As we have explained, in later life Liszt took vows of poverty as a
Franciscan abbé and taught everyone and anyone for free, promoting the
many composers who came to him for help. We will meet many of these
further along.
This is also unique in the history of music.
Now we come to Liszt’s friend Berlioz, who did for the orchestra
what Liszt did for the piano.
131
HECTOR BERLIOZ
(1803 – 69)
(Always pronounce the ‘z’ at the end of Berlioz’s name,
even though he was French.)
Although we do not always see Berlioz in the common short lists
of great composers, the stories about him are so amusing and his
influence was so great that we have to list him here. Berlioz was a little
older than the other composers we have been discussing – all of whom
were his friends; he was born in 1803.
He was a slight, energetic young
man from the South of France with
an amazing head of bushy red hair
(as you can see in this caricature by
Vernet) and rather pointy features.
Berlioz had been sent to Paris
by his father to study medicine.
Uniquely
among
composers,
he
could play no musical instrument –
unless you count failed efforts at trying to teach himself the guitar or
the flute when a teenager.
In Paris, however, he found that studying medicine consisted of
cutting up dead bodies in a disgusting hall full of rats, and that
going to musical events was a lot pleasanter. This convinced him
to give up medicine and become a composer.
132
No one took him seriously. However, by a fluke of fate, Hector had
perfect pitch and could compose music without needing a keyboard,
so it made very little difference to him that he was not a pianist,
or even a violinist, and he insisted on being a student at the
Conservatoire, much to the annoyance of everyone there – they could
not claim he was not French, so after some hesitation on their part
he enrolled as a student composition.
Then, by going on and on at it, he finally won the Prix de Rome –
the Rome Prize – the Holy Grail for any young French composer.
You must know what the Prix de Rome signifies:
The Rome Prize was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, better known
as the foe of the Three Musketeers, in 1648. It was originally just for
artists and sculptors; subsequently musicians were also included.
The Prix de Rome survived all the drastic changes of government
undergone by the French nation and was, until it was dropped in 1968,
the most coveted award ever instituted in Europe. The winning student
was given a two or three-year period of residence and training
in Rome, and it marked them for life.
Originally, the young artists would be in residence in the Palazzo
Mancini at the expense of the King of France, but after a short hiatus
during the Revolution it was reinstated by Napoleon who arranged that
the winners be resident at the Villa Medici – the ‘French Academy’ –
atop the Spanish Steps.
133
It seems that in 1968 the minister of culture, André Malraux,
felt that Rome no longer had a monopoly on artistic knowledge and
it was no longer an advantage to send students there.
Despite Malraux, there are still today some students who are
sent to the Villa Medici for eighteen-month or two-year periods.
If you follow the stories of many French composers you find that
the awarding, the striving for, the publicity, the debates and the hullabaloo
that surrounded the Rome Prize has been on-going since its inception.
However, before Berlioz went
to Rome he went to the theatre.
Now, the drama being presented was
Hamlet, performed by an English
company
–
in
English.
Hector
couldn’t speak a word of English,
but that did not stop him from falling
madly (we use the word advisedly)
in love with the girl playing Ophelia,
Harriet Smithson (pictured here as
she appeared in that role).
Hector became so passionately
despondent and suicidal over the fact that Miss Smithson did not respond
to his feelings that he went out into the countryside while it was raining,
hoping, if possible, to die of pneumonia (in those days this was termed
“an inflammation of the lungs”) and his friends, Liszt and Chopin, had to
go out to find him and dry him off.
134
They also had to explain to him that it was hard for Harriet to
respond to his feelings when he had never met her and she didn’t know
that he existed.
During
this
one-sided,
and
therefore
unrequited,
romance
he composed a huge symphonic work, inspired by his mad dreams of
Harriet and of life and death – and you will sound like an expert if you
know all about it: he called it Symphonie Fantastique (‘The Fantastic
Symphony’), subtitled Episode in the Life of an Artist.
This work was indeed fantastic as it was written for an orchestra
larger than had ever been put together before, with extra woodwind
and brass for colour.
It had an unprecedented five movements, all of which made use of
the same musical motif to describe his various fantasies about Harriet.
These included not only his murder of her, his march to the gallows,
but a witches’ Sabbath, in which she appears as a she-devil in Hell.
The ‘motif’ – or obsessional little tune – is called the “idée fixe”
because that was the effect she had had on him (we call it ‘fixation’).
Almost by accident, Berlioz had invented an entirely new kind of
symphony – a cross between a symphony and a tone poem.
In one way or another, this idea was to influence many, if not all,
composers who came after him – even if they did not know or care
about Harriet Smithson.
Amazing as this may sound, five years after the Fantastic
Symphony, Berlioz married Harriet Smithson.
135
Not so amazingly – the marriage was a total failure. She soon took
to drink and got fat after losing her career as a celebrated actress.
Before he married her, however, Hector tried being in love with
another young lady, a promising eighteen year-old pianist by the name
of Marie Moke (that was actually her name).
While he was in Rome on his Prix de Rome scholarship, however,
believing himself engaged to Marie, her mother wrote and told him
she had become engaged to another – none other than the ubiquitous
manager, piano manufacturer and music publisher, Camille Pleyel.
This was a good move for Marie’s career, as you may recognize this
Pleyel as the same character in whose office Liszt and Chopin met.
Furious, Hector decided to go to Paris to shoot them both, but
by the terms of the Rome Prize he was not to leave Italy before his
fellowship was up, and if it was known he had left it would be
forfeited. To get round this he got hold of woman’s clothing as a
disguise, and a gun. When he reached Nice (or ‘Nizza’ – as it was still
Italian in those days), Berlioz got tired of the clothes; he also thought
better of the intended murder, and went back to Rome.
During his lay-over in Nice, he went up on a hill to compose some
music, which he did in a notebook on his knee. As we have explained,
he had perfect pitch and didn’t need a keyboard. Seeing him there
scribbling away, the Italian border police arrested him and took him to
jail, accusing him of being a spy and making notes in code.
136
It was some time before they could find a musician to affirm that
his code was musical notation. They found this difficult to believe as
“everyone knew” that composers sat ruffling their hair at keyboards.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given his excitable nature, he became tired
of the whole business of the Rome Prize with all its disciplines and left
before finishing his three years after all.
It was a little while after this that Harriet Smithson returned to
Paris, was finally introduced to Hector, and, touched by his devotion,
embarked upon their ill-fated marriage (Liszt was the best man).
Berlioz always wanted to
compose enormous works for
huge symphony orchestras, and
sometimes vast opera companies.
As a result, even with a great
deal of help from Franz Liszt,
only some of his works became
at all known and still cost
a ridiculous amount of money
to perform.
One
concert
often
hears
overtures
his
Roman
Carnaval and Le Corsaire, and
very occasionally a really big
opera house can afford to put on The Trojans, or just one act from it.
137
Berlioz actually made a living as a music critic, and became
a witty, charming, worldly-wise – perhaps more world-weary – man.
In his last years he wrote his Memoirs, in which we find all these
stories and many others.
This is a book that makes experts of us all as it vividly describes
the Paris of his time.
Finally, he tells how, when old and retired, he met once again a first
love called Estelle, a girl whom he had idolised when he was fourteen.
He took to seeing her every day. She was astonished at this attention
from someone she had not seen for fifty years and could hardly
remember, at that. But you must remember this was the Romantic
Period and people still had Great Loves.
As far as Marie Moke is concerned, her marriage to Pleyel was
definitely not a success. Extremely successful as a professional pianist,
she was not only extremely pretty, but known for the passion and
drama of her interpretations at the keyboard. Unfortunately, these
attributes seem to have entered her private life as well, and Pleyel
divorced her amidst great scandal.
None of this affected her career, however, which took her touring
almost as much as her friend Franz Liszt.
We should add that, not very surprisingly, she never got very good
reviews from Berlioz whenever she played in Paris.
138
JOHANNES BRAHMS
(1833 – 77)
We are used to seeing pictures of Johannes Brahms as a portly man,
somewhat slovenly in dress, with a long, straggly beard and a suspicion
that his vest is covered with food stains or cigar ashes.
It is a surprise, therefore, to discover that this picture is far from
accurate and only due to the fact that photography came into common use
when he was an older man.
As a young man, Brahms was
extraordinarily handsome. One can
read about women reacting to him as
their descendents reacted to Elvis.
Despite this, he was never able to
establish
a
relationship
with
a
respectable woman, unless you count
his
long
Schumann.
devotion
The
to
mature
Clara
Brahms
looks like such a solid homebody
that this comes as a surprise, too.
Modern psychologists like to say that this avoidance of commitment
was due to the fact that as an adolescent he had been an entertainer in the
lowly bars of Hamburg’s red-light district and had, as a result, developed a
‘Madonna Complex’ that marked him for life.
139
It is true that the part of Hamburg in which the Brahms family lived
was the infamous St. Paul District, and so it is likely that the first
women he knew were not ladies.
Music historians like to quote something he said to a friend
about his early conditioning and “how could I possibly develop
normal relationships with the opposite sex?”
As if to prove his point, as he walked along the streets of Vienna,
it would happen that the women we now refer to as working girls
would approach him in the most familiar manner and ask for loans
or gifts. More often than that he would grant their requests.
However, one must be careful of interpreting this kind of anecdote;
as you will have noticed – very few of the musicians we have discussed
had normal middle-class marriages and the most common reason was
money – or the lack of it – and many were attracted to women who were
above them in social class.
Brahms’ father was a minor musician in a theatrical orchestra in
Hamburg, where Johannes was born in 1833. His mother was a seamstress
seventeen years older than his father.
In his early twenties Brahms was done a very big favour by a young
violinist by the name of Édouard Réményi, who took him along
as his accompanist when he toured Hungary.
This tour gave him the opportunity to hear Hungarian folk music,
which inspired some of his most successful works, his two sets of
Hungarian Dances. This was actually Gypsy music, but no matter.
140
Then there was the violinist, Joseph Joachim, who was responsible
for Brahms being received in Weimar by the great Franz Liszt.
As Liszt was by far the most influential musician of the age, this was
a huge opportunity.
Unfortunately, when Liszt welcomed the young man to his studio,
showed an interest in his work, and then – as an unusual honour
and courtesy – played him his own newly completed B minor Sonata,
Brahms fell asleep.
(As far as the B minor Sonata is concerned, we hope, as new
experts, you recognized this as the work so despised by Hanslick
in our chapter on music critics.)
Joachim also organized for Brahms to meet Robert Schumann,
and his wife, Clara. Schumann became the young composer’s sponsor
and friend. When Schumann met Brahms, he was only twenty-one
and at his handsomest. Schumann was so impressed by Brahms as
a musician that he announced his discovery in the journal he edited.
He told his readership, in somewhat overwrought romantic terms, that
the Hero to save music had arrived.
A much discussed question has always been: was Brahms in love
with Clara – even though she was older than himself by fourteen years,
very like his mother was to his father, as well as being the mother of
eight children – or vice versa. The question arises as Brahms became
her moral and financial support during her husband’s final illness and
incarceration in a mental asylum.
141
The answer to this is that nobody knows. Nor, really, is it any of
our business.
They did not marry, they did not have an affair, but remained very
close friends and colleagues until their deaths, and as they burnt their
correspondence, we will never know. It seems reasonable to suppose
that Clara had noticed how handsome, kind and brilliant he was.
The movie mentioned earlier in reference to Robert Schumann,
Song of Love, deals with this romantic question.
When Clara Schumann died, Brahms tried to take the train from
Vienna to her funeral – took the wrong connection, missed the funeral,
caught a chill – and soon after died. That was in Vienna in 1897.
Much of this may be just talk as biographers report that there were
many women with whom Brahms became infatuated. There was talk
among the insiders at the time of a possible wedding in each case;
there was never a marriage, however, nor even an attempt at one.
And one must remember that when Brahms joined with two friends
to write a sonata, his section, the Scherzo, was based on the letters FAB,
which stand for Frei Aber Einse (Free But Lonely).
Brahms had a ready wit, which could be acerbic.
On one occasion, he was listening to a string quartet playing one of
his compositions. When the playing was finished, the viola player
turned to the composer and asked him how he liked the tempo.
As they had been unable to play together at all, he answered,
“Oh, splendid, splendid indeed – particularly that of the viola!”
142
There was a civil war in the music world between the admirers of
Brahms and those of Wagner, as mentioned earlier.
Wagner, about whom it is hard to find anything nice to say as a
person, allowed savage warfare to be waged by his acolytes, who
wrote vicious attacks on Brahms. Brahms rarely allowed himself to be
provoked into responding and comported himself in a cool,
gentlemanly way.
His reaction to the news of Wagner’s death is an example of this:
Brahms, conducting a choral group when this news was brought
to him, laid down his baton and announced they would play no more
that day, and with bowed head gravely stated, “A master has died!”
Hans von Bülow, who was a great pianist and conductor and whose
Meiningen Orchestra was one of the finest in the world, had been
one of Wagner’s most important musical supporters. He had also been
Liszt’s student, and had been married to his daughter, Cosima,
as you will remember. After Cosima left him to live with Wagner,
however, he not surprisingly left the Wagner camp and became a
Brahms supporter instead.
It was von Bülow who first referred to Brahms’ First Symphony as
‘Beethoven’s Tenth’. This is a quote that all experts know and quote
unnecessarily often, so it is better to be ready for it.
This naming of Brahms’ First Symphony ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’ is clearly
understandable to all those who hear it, but, in fact, it took Brahms many
years before he dared produce a symphony – due to his awe of Beethoven.
143
When asked whether he would ever write a symphony he would say,
“How could I, with the shadow of Beethoven behind me?”
In reference to the doubts Brahms’ contemporaries had about his
symphony, and the fact it was based on almost nothing as a musical theme,
Leonard Bernstein said, “How could Brahms’ critics have missed this
resemblance to Beethoven’s work?… Hadn’t they learned yet from
the great works of Beethoven that ‘almost nothing’ can evolve into
musical structures of incredible power and beauty?”
Brahms went on to compose three more symphonies, but among his
most played and admired works are his two piano concertos, which are
massive, dramatic, very beautiful, and extremely hard to play.
Brahms had a masculine, sonorous way of playing and composing for
the piano; among these works is a set of twenty devastatingly difficult and
amusing Variations on Paganini’s Caprice #24 in A minor.
As an expert, you will recognize this musical joke, as it is the same
theme that Liszt had used years before for the set of variations he wrote
when he first heard Paganini and gave up his idea of taking Holy Orders.
We will meet this theme by Paganini again when we come to
Rachmaninoff, who surpassed even himself when he composed his own
Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for piano and orchestra. Whereas most
people know Brahms’ Lullaby, you are far ahead if you know this story.
Brahms was once invited to dinner by a proud wine connoisseur,
who brought out his best bottle saying, “This is the Brahms of my cellar.”
After sniffing the wine Brahms said, “Better bring out your Beethoven.”
144
Here’s a more recent anecdote: in the 1940s, the pianist Artur Schnabel
was always amazed to read in programme notes for his concerts in
America that ‘Brahms had thought highly of my playing’! At thirteen
Schnabel had, in fact, met the great man, but all he remembered him
ever saying was ‘did you enjoy your lunch?’
In these later years Brahms did grow stout, with a beard, and didn’t
notice when he had crumbs on his jacket, but those who were close to him
knew him to be kind, with a twinkle.
145
RICHARD WAGNER
(1813-1883)
We have already mentioned this man many
times. So we had better give a complete picture.
As we have indicated, a great many people
become enamoured of the intoxicating grandeur
of Wagner’s music and its lush harmonies.
They listen raptly to his enormous operas,
swept away by their own emotions – and then
they grow out of it.
Although Wagner composed operas, which are outside the scope of
this guide, we include him because this was the experience of almost
every composer of the second half of the 19th century, whether they
composed operas or not.
For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche – a passable amateur composer
as well as influential philosopher – was a disciple and friend of
Wagner as a young man, then turned just as passionately against him,
feeling that his attraction to Wagner and his world was dangerous
for his mental well-being. Nietzsche ended up insane in any case.
This is what happened: in 1888, five years after Wagner’s death,
Nietzsche wrote The Wagner Case, at the same time he was working
on his major philosophical work The Will to Power, and Twilight of the
Idols (the last of Wagner’s iconic Ring cycle is Twilight of the Gods).
146
It was after this that, not surprisingly, he suffered a complete
mental breakdown from which he never recovered.
This was the kind of effect Wagner had on all the younger
generation of musicians and artists in the late 19th century.
However, one does quite often hear orchestral excerpts from some
of his operas in the concert hall. One you are likely to hear is the
‘Prelude and Liebestod’ from Tristan and Isolde.
If you want to be really expert, tell people that Wagner himself
never called the final scene of this very symphonic opera ‘Liebestod’
(‘Love-Death’). That name was given to it by Liszt when he made
a piano transcription of it.
Needless to say, Liszt’s transcription became a favourite showpiece
for virtuoso pianists long before most people heard the opera.
A footnote about Wagner: his most famous operas are all based
either on medieval legends or are about Icelandic power-mad gods
from some strange prehistoric era. As none of these contain any ethnic
ideas, and are chiefly about non-humans, they have nothing to do with
the fascist and racist ideas attributed to them thanks to his greatest fan,
Hitler, whose admiration has given Wagner an even worse name than
he deserves.
Wagner offended almost everyone, but one must be fair.
147
PART III
What You Need to Know about
other Important Composers
Some
of the composers included from here on are certainly
in the category of Great Composers, but some are perhaps only
Important Composers or Influential Composers – only time will tell
whether their music will survive the ups and downs of fashion and
continue to lift the hearts of listeners. These include:
Late Romantic Germans
ANTON BRUCKNER
(1811-83)
Bruckner was an exception to the many musicians of this time
who became instant and passionate devotees of Wagner, but who then
swung just as passionately in the opposite direction.
A modest, pious, profoundly musical man, an organist and almost
entirely self-educated, he became a disciple of Wagner, whom he
idolized, and remained so all his life.
148
He did not compose huge operas, however – only huge symphonies
(eight, with the Ninth unfinished). He never married, but late in life
took to suddenly proposing marriage to amazed and unsuspecting
young ladies.
His recognition came late, but today Bruckner is very fashionable
among the ‘in-crowd’ of composers and connoisseurs.
As an expert, you must tread carefully here if you actually find
his works numbingly long. It is best to say you enjoy his Eighth and
talk about it being ‘all about a man’s argument with his Fate,
represented by the dotted rhythms’, and how much you appreciate
‘the motif emerging threateningly from the basses and mercilessly
subduing the imploring sighs that are emitted by the woodwinds’.
This sort of thing is normal music-speak for music critics and
programme-note writers and is highly acceptable.
GUSTAV MAHLER
(1860-1911)
Mahler
late
German
was an integral part of
Romanticism.
He
was,
not surprisingly, therefore, affected by
such fellow Viennese as Sigmund Freud.
He, too, wrote huge symphonies – ten of
them – and great song cycles like Songs of
A Wayfarer and Youth’s Magic Horn.
149
Song of the Earth is sometimes thought of as a song cycle, but it is
actually a symphony. It was intended to be his tenth symphony, but
Mahler was superstitious of exceeding the magic number ‘nine’ set by
Beethoven, fearing he would die if he composed a symphony No.10.
So he named his tenth symphony Das Lied von der Erde, (‘Song of
the Earth’). Happy to have cheated death, he proceeded on to compose
his official ‘Tenth Symphony’, whereupon he died before completing
more than one movement.
It is good to know that despite his enormous influence as a
musician, Mahler is also known for having married a famous beauty
called Alma Schindler, who also married Franz Werfel, a novelist
well known at that time, and thirdly the architect Walter Gropius,
who was to design the Pan Am building in New York in the 1950’s.
Mahler was also famous for being one of the greatest conductors
and music directors of the early twentieth century, mainly of the
Vienna State Opera, and later of the Met in New York, together with
two seasons as chief conductor of the New York Philharmonic.
Conducting was his main occupation; composition was in fact his
summer activity.
He died at fifty, of heart failure as the result of rheumatic fever
when young.
Many people will tell you they are going to a full cycle of Wagner’s
Ring, or to a full cycle of Mahler symphonies or to a cycle of Bruckner
symphonies. Just smile and say how nice. They will only do it once.
150
RICHARD STRAUSS
(1864-1949)
Strauss came a little late in the German
Romantic school and composed ten Tone
Poems that we hear very often.
These include Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry
Pranks and Thus Spake Zarathustra – known
to movie-lovers as 2001 A Space Odyssey.
He then moved on to orchestrally brilliant,
luridly dramatic operas such as Elektra and Salome. The latter was
banned from several opera houses for indecency and profanity.
In all of these, anyone can detect his huge admiration of Wagner,
even without being an expert. His complete mastery of the orchestra –
for which he entirely credited Wagner, is also heard in the opera
Der Rosenkavalier – which isn’t indecent, just a bit immoral.
Always say that your favourite among Strauss’s works are the
Four Last Songs. These really are beautiful, but are – like so many of
the works of these later Germanic composers – really depressing.
In the 1930’s Strauss allowed himself to be used by the Nazis,
agreeing to be made president of the ‘Reichsmusik-kammer’, though
he endangered himself by objecting to the banning of his Jewish
librettist Stefan Zweig.
In the end, he did resign from his official post, and managed to
get exonerated by the “De-Nazification Tribunal” after the war.
151
French Composers and Other Oddities
including CLAUDE DEBUSSY and MAURICE RAVEL
Usually it is enough to know that Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)
and Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937) are termed “Impressionists”,
like their contemporary painters. Although it is almost annoying
how often they are called “Impressionists” it is still OK to do this,
and it is actually quite true.
They are known as “Impressionists” because, like the painters,
they were not interested in strict forms but in impressions of light and
mood and innovative harmonies.
It would be unkind to remind the
reader of what Saint-Saëns said about
Debussy in an earlier chapter, but there
was much truth in it. Although he was
a trifle harsh in saying Debussy ‘did not
create a style, but cultivated an absence of
style, logic and common sense’, you could
say that Debussy was the true founder of
“modernism” – by making sound effects take the place of music.
It is not difficult to remember what to say about Debussy,
as being a French composer it is safe to say he won the Prix de Rome.
152
Ravel’s five efforts to win the Rome Prize caused a huge affaire
among the press and musical cognoscenti of Paris, a city that loves
an uproar – it was a scandal that made him famous and caused
the resignation of the director of the Conservatoire.
Ravel failed to win the Rome Prize year after year, even though
at the time of his first application he had composed three of his most
enduring works: the piano piece Jeux d’Eau, the haunting Pavane
for a Dead Infanta, and the song-cycle, Schéherézade. His music
seemed overly iconoclastic to the judges.
Looking around for interesting and novel sounds, both Debussy and
Ravel virtually invented Spanish music, although neither of them
ever bothered to go to Spain. Parisians leave Paris as little as possible.
They did this with the help of another French composer, whom
we will describe shortly, Bizet; subsequently musicians from Spain
would come to Paris to learn how to do it. This is really good to know
because even established experts are not all aware of this French
invention of Spain.
Debussy, who was inspired in this by a postcard someone sent him
from a holiday in Spain, created a sound that has been accepted as
“Spanish” ever since. This can be heard in the piano pieces Soirée dans
Grenade and La Puerta del Vino, as well as the orchestral Images.
Meanwhile, Ravel was the son of a Swiss inventor, and approached
music with a watch-maker’s precision in both his sound effects and
his structures.
153
Like Debussy, he never left Paris if he could help it, but he
composed a number of works with Spanish themes, including
Alborado
the
one-act
del
gracioso,
opera
espagnole, the Pavane
l’Heure
pour
une Infante Défunte, Rapsodie
espagnole,
and,
of
course,
Boléro, which continued to
bring in huge royalties for
half a century after his death.
Note: Ravel had slightly
more excuse than Debussy or
Bizet to develop a Spanish
ethos as his mother’s family was of Basque origin and when he was
a baby they lived near the border with Spain.
At the time this Spanish inspiration caused another Parisian furore,
as critics claimed that in working with this idea, Ravel was imitating
Debussy. But no one was at all concerned when Manuel de Falla and
Enrique Granados came to Paris to find out how to achieve this
Spanish sound, nor when they were subsequently imitated by a host of
other composers from Spain. But that is very French.
We should remind the reader that Georges Bizet had preceded these
two by a whole generation with this idea when he composed Carmen –
without ever having been to Spain, either (He did, however, as you
may have guessed, win the Prix de Rome).
154
This is all actually true about Spanish music and you can always get
a lot of attention by pointing it out, as we explained above.
There were many differences between Debussy and Ravel,
however. Debussy was extremely disagreeable, and had a number of
‘relationships’ – including bad marriages – while Ravel was neat,
intellectual, loved cats and never married anyone.
But to continue with the similarities between them: they both
composed music that was featured by the celebrated Russian
impresario Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes.
Debussy’s offering was l’Après-Midi d’un Faune. This is really
a Tone Poem, which, choreographed a bit salaciously, made his
lead dancer, the celebrated Nijinsky, notorious.
Ravel, meanwhile provided Daphnis and Chloé, the Boléro,
and a troubling, magnificent work known as La Valse.
Diaghilev did not want to produce La Valse, though, as it was
obviously a musical depiction of the end of European civilization as they
had known it. This tortured waltz rushes toward the self-destruction of
World War I and the final years of the century, but it is frequently heard in
the concert hall today.
Debussy’s private life, while unattractive, certainly makes up for
the lack of scandal in so many composers’ lives. He first lived in
a small apartment in Montmartre, surrounded by the artistic community,
with a girl by the name of Gabrielle Dupont. His small income did not
keep her happy and this affair came to an end.
155
He replaced Gabrielle with an artist’s model, a tubercular girl called
Lilly Texier, whom he married. This did not last either.
Next he took up with Emma Bardac, the wife of a banker and former
girlfriend of the composer Gabriel Fauré, his teacher; they eloped to
Jersey, where poor Lilly tried to shoot herself. This gave Debussy a bad
name in Paris; this marriage was evidently full of strain as he tried to make
an income adequate to her needs when they returned to the capital.
Other than a great deal of music for piano, Debussy also composed
the opera Pélléas et Mélisande. This is a work it is much better to
know about than go to. It is advisable that you find you are busy on the
night you are invited to go, although this is another of those things you
must not admit to.
As a musical expert you are expected to go into raptures over this
seemingly aimless and lengthy work and know the names of all the
singers who have tried to make sense of it. You can always mention
Mary Garden, the young American soprano who was the sensation of
Paris in 1900 and who premiered the role of Mélisande in 1902.
In fact, Debussy nearly had to fight a duel with the writer of the
poem on which Pélléas et Melisande was based, Maurice Maeterlinck,
who was expecting his wife, the soprano Georgette Leblanc, to sing
the leading role. On the other hand, Debussy produced a large, magical
three-movement work for symphony orchestra called La Mer.
(‘La Mer’ should not be confused with la mère – as in Ravel’s
Ma mère l’oye – which means ‘mother’. La Mer means ‘the ocean’.)
156
Debussy’s La Mer,
which depicts the ocean
during the course of a
day,
is
of
course
a
Tone Poem. It is a work
you
can
very
safely
praise.
Debussy died during
the final year of WWI.
Ravel, meanwhile, lived on into the 20th century and became a friend
of George Gershwin in the 1920’s, going as far as to put a taste of jazz
into several of his own works.
We must admit, however, that these two most famous French
composers were preceded, and followed, by a number of others one hears
very little about outside France. This is the world’s revenge on
French chauvinism, as there is nothing wrong with their music.
Among the great French composers before Debussy and Ravel –
between the Romantic Berlioz and the ‘Impressionists’ – there were
César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns and Georges Bizet.
César Franck (1822-90) was a scholarly, nice man, humble and
unassuming, who spent most of his life as the organist at the church of
Sainte Clothilde in Paris – where you can see a sculpture of him
as a young man in the courtyard.
157
Franck was actually born in Belgium, but grew up and lived in
Paris, giving music lessons as well as playing the organ. He is best
known for his D minor Symphony, and a very often heard violin sonata
that can be variously played on the cello, viola and flute – which
doubles up
how often one hears it. He also wrote visionary organ-
sounding works for the piano and a magnificent Piano Quintet. A good
thing to say about Franck’s works is that they have a haunting quality.
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS
(1835-1921)
We
have already mentioned that
Saint-Saëns
was
an
amazing
child
prodigy. His life spans the Romantic
period, as he was born when Chopin and
Liszt were still young, gave his first
recital at age ten when they were still
in their prime, and yet he lived into the
1920s. This means he lived long enough
to play Chopin’s music for an impressed
young Arthur Rubinstein.
He was not only a child prodigy;
he continued as a fabulous pianist. He composed five piano concertos
as vehicles for his own concert performances, but with the exception of
the Second, which is really beautiful, these are rarely played today.
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He actually made a living, like Franck, as the organist at one of
Paris’ major churches, in his case the Madeleine. Franz Liszt, no mean
organist himself, said that Saint-Saëns was the greatest organist
in the world.
As a student, Saint-Saëns made two attempts to win the Prix de
Rome. The first time he was considered too young, the second time
he was considered much too successful already. Further, his
first symphony was performed when he left the Conservatoire and
was passed off as the work of a German. He could get away with this
as the French took it for granted that symphonies were German. This
may have had something to do with his not getting the Rome Prize.
A Saint-Saëns work one often hears is his third symphony, which
features the organ in its finale and is known as the ‘Organ Symphony’,
but perhaps his greatest work was the opera Samson and Delilah.
This opera’s production was banned for many years in several
European countries, including France, because of its unsavory biblical
subject, much as Salome was also. In its richness of sound it seemed
very heavy to the French – even Wagnerian – but Liszt, as usual,
came to the rescue, and organized its first production in Weimar,
where he had been music director, and still had influence.
Most people are familiar with Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre,
which was used in Walt Disney’s film Fantasia. They also know the
Carnival of the Animals, which Saint-Saëns tossed off to amuse
some friends at a children’s party. There’s lots of French wit in this.
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Saint-Saëns has not been considered a very important composer.
Maybe the reason lies in his own words:
“The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines,
by harmonious colours and by a beautiful succession of chords,
does not understand the art of music.”
Music critics have never known what to make of this, with the
result that he has not had the press he deserves.
He also wrote books on philosophy, literature, painting, the theatre,
studied astronomy, physics, natural history, archaeology and mastered
several languages. This kind of mind is very French.
Berlioz said of his young protégé, “Saint-Saëns knows everything,
but he lacks inexperience.”
The charm of Saint-Saëns’ music hides a saddened life, however.
An early marriage collapsed after the sudden deaths of his two infant
children within six weeks of each other.
Sadly, he considered his young wife negligent, as one had fallen
out of a window. Disillusioned, he packed his bags and left; he never
saw his wife again.
He spent the remaining forty-three years of his life traveling,
visiting practically every country on earth, from Europe to Ceylon and
the Far East, two tours of the United States, and South America.
He died while holidaying in Algeria in 1921.
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GEORGES BIZET
(1838-1875)
A word concerning Georges Bizet, born three years after Saint-Saëns.
He is best known – and really only known – for Carmen.
The myth that he died of a broken heart because Carmen failed
when first produced is entirely false.
The truth was that he had a weak heart, having had rheumatic fever
earlier in his life, and although Carmen was not a flop at its première,
it is true that no-one could have imagined its future success.
Well, no-one but Tchaikovsky, who heard it while on a visit to
Paris and confidently predicted that it would become the most popular
opera in the world. He was, of course, absolutely right.
And it is also true that the opera did benefit a great deal by
the addition of sung dialogue after the first run.
There were no scandals in Bizet’s life. After winning the Prix de
Rome at nineteen with his composition Clovis and Clotilde,
he subsequently married into the operatic business – his father-in-law
was the lyricist and composer Jacques Halévy, whose grand opera
La Juive was a huge success, becoming a starring role for Caruso.
So, although it was not a failure at its premiere, it is true to say that
Bizet would have enjoyed a big breakthrough with Carmen had he
lived just one month longer.
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In addition to these there was Charles Gounod, who composed
grand operas, such as Faust, and Gabriel Fauré, who was out-distanced
by his student Debussy, but also composed with a lot of atmosphere.
There was also Erik Satie, a café performer, who had quite an
influence on the young Parisian composers with strange little pieces.
These had even odder titles, such as ‘Pièce en forme de Poire’ –
‘Piece in the Shape of a Pear’ (Satie was an ‘Absurdist’), and the
better known, and hauntingly beautiful, Gymnopédies – whatever that
means.
The music of all these composers is regularly performed in France,
so the expert should be aware that even though it only occasionally
crosses the Atlantic, everyone knows about it.
Russian Composers
Russian composers are in a class by themselves. It is hard to go to
a symphonic concert, still less a ballet, without hearing a work by
Tchaikovsky, for instance, or a piano concerto by Prokofiev or
Rachmaninoff.
And there are so many others: for instance there are the five
great self-styled ‘amateur’, nationalist, composers: Borodin, Balakirev,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Cui, described below.
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Then there are Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri
Shostakovich and Alexander Scriabin, all of whom come under
the heading of “Great Composers,” even though we have titled
this chapter Important Composers.
Such an explosion of talent and ability is overwhelming and hard to
deal with, but here are some important things to know about those
most often heard:
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
(1840-1893)
(It is sometimes thought snobbish to spell
the name as ‘Tschaikowsky’, or even
Chaijkovski; however, as in Russian it is
written in the Cyrillic alphabet anyway,
one needn’t worry overly about this).
To
start with, like Berlioz, Tchaikovsky
only began to become a composer as a grown
young man, having completed a law degree at Moscow University, and
could only play the piano somewhat.
He was the protégé of the famous Rubinstein brothers, Anton and
Nicholas, outstanding pianists and founders of the great Moscow and
St. Petersburg Conservatories. These two encouraged him, had his
works heard, and tried to stop his lifelong tendency to be depressed.
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Tchaikovsky is well known to audiences through his First
Piano Concerto, which Nicholas Rubinstein – for whom he composed
the work – said was ‘unplayable’, and the Violin Concerto, composed
for the great violinist Leopold Auer – who said that it couldn’t be played.
Generally, his music falls into two types – first there is the music
he composed based on a story, such as his Romeo and Juliet Overture,
Francesca da Rimini, or the immortal ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping
Beauty and The Nutcracker, and operas like Eugene Onegin, in all of
which the music is colourful, lyrical, beautiful and always captivating.
Secondly, there is the music he composed when he was supported
on a generous yearly stipend from an eccentric rich widow,
Nadezhda von Meck. This peculiar lady specified that Tchaikovsky
must never try to meet her, but she kept very closely in touch with him
through almost daily correspondence over a period of thirteen years –
on every detail of his work and life.
We are now talking about his symphonies, which he wrote while
on his stipend. Unlike his ballets, they are dramatic, tragic, introverted
and long. This must mean something, and can be used for
conversations into which you can mix some psychology.
As far as Mme. von Meck is concerned, that relationship was really
odd. Although they weren’t supposed to meet it did nearly happen:
Once, while they were both staying in Florence, she asked him to visit
her, but this invitation came so unexpectedly that Tchaikovsky
was taken aback and couldn’t bring himself to go.
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She later broke off the connection with no explanation and nobody
knows why – nor did Tchaikovsky.
All this was very strange, but also very Russian.
His only other effort at a relationship, before the long stable
association with Mme. von Meck, was an ill-fated very brief marriage
to a mentally unbalanced admiring student, which left both
Tchaikovsky and the young woman on the verge of nervous
breakdowns. The woman did eventually end up in an asylum.
Tchaikovsky later traveled to the United States where he conducted
the opening concert of Carnegie hall in 1891. Tchaikovsky was a
sensation in America, where he was more celebrated than at home,
which amazed him.
His death was a sad one, it being often believed today that
he committed suicide by deliberately drinking un-boiled water
during one of the periodic cholera epidemics in St. Petersburg;
they say someone warned him that his secret tendency towards
homosexuality was about to be exposed.
This seems a desperate way to die for whatever reason and
it may well have been a coincidence.
According to Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky “was one of the most
charming artists and men I ever met. He had an unequaled delicacy
of mind. He was modest, as all really great people are, and simple,
as very few are.”
Next:
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THE RUSSIAN ‘FIVE’
The aforementioned famous ‘Russian Five’ were all ‘amateur’
composers who disliked Western influence and believed that
composers should be self-taught and natural; that they should keep to
Russian themes, which often meant somewhat colourful Asiatic ones.
Obviously they disapproved of Tchaikovsky who they considered
a slave to Western Europe’s tastes and dogmatic musical traditions.
The Five were particularly partial to Tone Poems.
Nicolai
Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) – a naval officer –
is best known for his exotic Schéhérézade Suite, which was later
choreographed for the Ballets Russes in Paris, and also for the opera
Le Coq d’Or. This opera was to turn out to be a fore-runner of
Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird. As Stravinsky was Rimsky-Korsakov’s
student perhaps this is not surprising. He also composed many operas –
all richly coloured show pieces.
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) – an army officer – is best
known for Pictures at an Exhibition, which is played all the time
both in Mussorgsky’s original solo piano version and the version
Ravel created for orchestra. However, his opera Boris Godunov is
regarded as extremely important, and you can’t go wrong by claiming
a liking for it, even though it is somewhat heavy going.
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Boris (if you are a real connoisseur you always refer to it by
its first name only) was considered so heavy that Mussorgsky’s
fellow member of The Five, Rimsky-Korsakov, re-orchestrated
the whole thing after Mussorgsky’s death.
This was not the end of people trying to help Mussorgsky out,
however – there was a later version made by Shostakovich, which
reinstated some of the original harshness and brutality, but these days
Mussorgsky’s own version is most often heard. To say you prefer
Mussorgsky’s original version, or even know about it, marks you out
as a definite expert and connoisseur.
Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) was a prize-winning chemist and
professor of chemistry; he also founded a school of medicine for women
in St. Petersburg, which was a great success.
He composed the opera Prince Igor and the String Quartet No. 2;
the latter is recognizable to everyone as the music that was adapted for
the Broadway musical Kismet.
The illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, Borodin loved his
scientific work; he was a professor at the Academy of Medicine in
St. Petersburg, where he had an apartment with his wife, and called
himself “a Sunday composer.” His friends, notably Balakirev, had to
push him to compose (Prince Igor, his only opera, was left incomplete
at his death). An excerpt from the opera – Polovtsian Dances – is often
heard, having been turned into a balletic showpiece by Diaghilev.
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Mili Balakirev (1837-1910) – a law student – composed Islamey
for the piano. In doing this he thought he had succeeded in writing
the most difficult virtuoso work ever composed, but it was later
outranked in difficulty by Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.
His piano works are brilliant, in the style of Liszt (naturally).
Then there was César Cui. Cui, the son of French officer who settled
in Russia and a Lithuanian mother, rose to the rank of general
in the Russian army.
No one has ever heard anything by Cui. The neophyte expert is well
advised to silence all others by remarking casually that he loves to
listen to César Cui’s Twenty-Five Preludes for the piano.
Few will say anything after this.
As for conversational anecdotes that sound expert, there is quite a
selection. For example:
Rimsky-Korsakov, after starting life as naval officer, moved over into
composition slowly. He kept up his association with the military, however,
as an inspector of naval bands. When asked to head the composition
department at the conservatory of St. Petersburg, he accepted, but actually
attended class with the students to fill in what he didn’t know.
Eventually, Rimsky was the orchestration teacher of every great
twentieth century Russian composer, and some not Russian.
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Mussorgsky drank (a lot). The portrait
done a few days before his death by the
painter Repin shows a man unrecognizable
from the photos of the debonair dandy
army officer of a few years earlier.
Here’s a cute curiosity: Borodin,
Rimsky-Korsakov, their friend Liadov,
and Liszt composed a once-famous set of
variations on Chopsticks.
Then we come to the later batch of Russian composers, starting with
the enfant terrible of them all:
IGOR STRAVINSKY
(1882-1971)
Stravinsky’s name was largely made by his work with Serge Diaghilev
and later George Balanchine, both of whom set his music to innovative
dance. He was a clever, industrious man; a survivor, who made the most
of his talent, eking it out with brilliantly clever rhythms and witty noises.
Try as he would, he could not come up with any beautiful themes as others
such as Rachmaninoff could.
He also had the good sense not to go back to Russia – a mistake made
by Prokofiev, as we will see.
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Stravinsky’s
most
popular
works by far are the ballets he
created as a young man for the
Ballets Russes. Everyone likes
these, whatever they think of
Stravinsky’s later works. When
Rimsky-Korsakov was too busy to
compose something for Diaghilev,
the impresario agreed to try out
Rimsky’s student – young Igor.
That was how his first commission came about; it was The Firebird,
which we have already mentioned.
This was a big success and others soon followed, such as Petrushka
and The Rite of Spring. Diaghilev had commissioned The Rite for
the great dancer Nijinski, who also was told to choreograph it as he had
done for Debussy’s l’Après Midi d’un Faune.
Nijinsky did this by incorporating really weird steps suggesting
the pagan violence of some distant age and human sacrifice.
The premiere took place in Paris’ Théâtre des Champs Élysées
and a real riot ensued. Nijinsky had to be held back forcibly from jumping
off the stage to engage in fisticuffs with a jeering member of the audience.
The police arrived. The Princess de Pourtalès stood up in her box and
announced in loud, cold tones that she had survived to a grand old age
and up till then nobody had tried to make a fool of her.
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It was reported by various eyewitnesses that there were faces slapped,
cards exchanged and assignations for duels made. The results of the
matters of honor are not known, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that
at least one of them was actually carried out.
What was most surprising was that all the hot tempers of the first night
performance were absent the very next night. But that is typically Parisian.
(To comment cleverly on this piece and its imagery one must refer
to the work of painters of the time such as Augustus John, and the
set designer Nicolas Roerich.)
As everything came to an end in Europe in 1914, Stravinsky wisely
decided not to go back to Russia, becoming a true international celebrity
through the 20’s and 30’s, and his name becoming synonymous with
everything clever and new – much like Picasso, his exact contemporary
and close parallel in the art world.
But then, Picasso was also a discovery of Diaghilev’s, like almost
everyone at that time. They were also alike in being exactly the same age
and living until the 1970’s.
After that, Stravinsky’s career found new scope in New York,
where he went with so many other European musicians, as we have seen.
He had the advantage of having known George Balanchine (or
Balanchivadze, as his Georgian name was originally spelt) in Paris
with the Ballets Russes.
Together they created the major works we know for the New York City
Ballet.
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Although no “oil painting”, as they say (see the Picasso caricature
at the top of this section), Stravinsky was a success with the ladies.
He married his young cousin and early sweetheart, Katerina Nossenko,
the mother of his children. Later he took as his second wife his life’s
soul-mate, Vera de Bosset – although there seems to have been some
serious over-lapping of those two ladies during mid-life.
As an expert, you must have something to say about this iconic man
who was so much part of his time and a forerunner of Modern Music
(to be discussed below).
Try to memorize the following quote from a paper by a Californian
academic in reference to the Rite of Spring. This quote will bear witness
to your expertise, but it must be learnt by heart, as this kind of thing
doesn’t spring naturally to the mind of the regular music lover:
“Questions may linger about the completeness of the octatonic record
in Part II, and in particular about the rapid collectional shifts and
consequent “outside” pitch elements. Could the approach at this point
benefit from, say, certain set-theoretic formulations? The answer here
seems to be Yes, but only up to rather limited point.”
Nor does it matter if you don’t know, or anyone know, what any of this
means. It is the just result of allowing music to be taken hostage by
acadaemia.
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SERGE PROKOFIEV
(1891-1953)
Prokofiev also came to Paris and composed ballet scores for
Diaghilev,
including
Le
Pas
d’Acier
(‘The Age of Steel’) and the better known
Prodigal
Son,
but,
unlike
Stravinsky,
he made the grave mistake of returning to
Russia well after the Bolshevik Revolution.
He went back just before Stalin began
his murderous purges, having been enticed
home with promises of an exalted position
in the Soviet state. He did this despite
having established a fine reputation in
the West.
Also, he was a dazzling pianist, which Stravinsky was not.
He went through some harrowing times when the regime took
against him. In 1948, during one of Stalin’s periodic paranoid phases,
a terrified state musical establishment declared that “Prokofiev’s
creative style was formed during his years in the West, where
the external novelty of his manner pleased the narrow, bourgeois circle
of aesthetes for whom he wrote his music.”
Prokofiev responded. “In my new opera I intend to write trios, duets
and choruses and make use of some interesting Russian folk songs.
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He was promptly awarded the Stalin Prize in 1951 for ‘On Guard
for Peace’, a paean to “the Soviet international peace movement.”
And it certainly was not true that Prokofiev’s creative style had
been formed in the West. On the contrary, in 1911, when he was still
a student at the Moscow Conservatory, everyone had been shocked by
the aggressiveness of his compositions, with their startling harmonic
changes and rhythms.
Later, his career was launched in the West when he made a tour of
America in 1918, sponsored by the Koussevitzky Foundation (you will
notice how often we will have to mention the name Koussevitzky).
As well as composing five piano concertos, with which he
could exploit his marvelous pianistic ability, Prokofiev composed
seven symphonies and two violin concertos. He could compose music
with humor, espièglerie, strange moods and fireworks. But he could
also write sweet music, as we hear in his Classical Symphony.
However, he also composed a famous Tone Poem that every child
has heard: the mini-musical narrative Peter and the Wolf.
In Russia he continued to write for the ballet, including
much performed works such as Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet.
He also composed operas, including The Love of Three Oranges and
War and Peace and marvelous film scores: Ivan the Terrible,
Alexander Nevsky and Lt. Kijé.
Reminiscent of Dr. Zhivago, one anecdote illustrates life in Russia
during the Soviet era.
174
Prokofiev’s wife, Lina, was arrested on trumped up charges of
spying and sent to a labour camp. By then Prokofiev had formed a
liaison with a Communist Party member, Mira Mendelson, with whom
he lived the rest of his life.
One suspects something questionable in Ms. Mendelson’s party
influence in this, n’est-ce pas?
DIMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
(1906-1975)
Shostakovich also lived in Russia through its Soviet period, and
was also disapproved of by Stalin, but unlike the much tougher
Prokofiev, he became a complete nervous wreck.
These Soviet composers couldn’t sleep at night dreading that
any moment they would be accused of “Decadent Formalism”.
Stalin considered himself a music lover (being a Georgian, he was),
but he knew what he liked, and liked what he knew, and modern music
was never a part of that.
He would relent if a case could be made for ‘Socialist Realism’ –
meaning lite-modern rousing music for the proletariat, with banal tunes
and marches – but that was it.
While Shostakovich’s music is neither “decadent” nor “formalistic,”
whatever that means, it is OK to say that it can be “troubling,”
as all his music is thought-provoking and full of character.
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In concert programmes you will notice his most often performed
work is his Fifth Symphony – a dramatic, brilliant work that got him
back into the Soviet establishment’s good books – not that he didn’t
remain very nervous.
As an expert, you can be safe in knowing that like so many of
these Russians, he was a dazzling pianist.
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN
(1872-1915)
Although
Scriabin falls more definitely into the category of
Important Composer than Great Composer, some of the stories
about him are very amusing.
He was a classmate of Rachmaninoff’s, and similarly his most
enduring works are those he wrote for the piano; he was also,
of course, a fabulous pianist.
Unfortunately, he was taken up with occult ideas and his music
can be very strange. This is a good thing to know, because although
it is rare to hear his music, when you do, you will hear that his
piano works are very pungent.
In addition to this, Scriabin was a huge egotist and developed
a theory of the future of music and of the world, with himself at the
center of it, naturally. He adopted some 20th century notions of a rather
spooky kind of mysticism and planned one great work – ‘The Mystery’.
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This was to combine music, poetry, dance, colours, perfumes, and a
new language consisting of sighs and exclamations. It was to be
performed only once – in India – in a great domed temple beside a lake
(he even made travel arrangements with a travel bureau in Moscow
for this). The audience was to consist of ‘worshippers’ who would
yield to a “supreme final ecstasy”.
He was convinced that his artistic vision was coming to pass –
that there was to be a cataclysm from the ruins of which he would
appear as a kind of Messiah ‘to reunite the human race with the Spirit.’
Oddly enough, Scriabin was not only allowed to walk around
the streets, but was celebrated as a composer and performer.
Koussevitzky hastened to sign him up for his publishing house and
conducted his three symphonies, ‘The Divine Poem’, ‘The Poem of
Ecstasy’, and ‘Prometheus’, which was a trial run for the Mystery.
In his personal life, Scriabin was an obsessive hypochondriac and
a wobbly sort of husband to wife Vera, a piano student who played
his music and gave him children.
He was later asked to leave the United States on the grounds of
“moral turpitude” when he went there with number two, Tatiana –
another young Moscow Conservatoire piano graduate who also played
his music everywhere, and gave him more children, and with whom he
was traveling and living, though they were not actually married.
After all this, he died of an infected carbuncle on the lip from
a shaving cut in 1915.
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Here is an entertaining anecdote about Scriabin:
“Who is your favourite composer?,” Scriabin asked of a young
Arthur Rubinstein over tea at the Café de la Paix.
When, without hesitation, Rubinstein answered “Brahms”, Scriabin
banged his fist on the table and screamed, “What, what? How can you
like this terrible composer and me at the same time? When I was your
age I was a Chopinist, later I was a Wagnerian, but now I can only be a
Scriabinist!,” and, enraged, took his hat and ran out of the café,
leaving poor Arthur with the bill.
“He was a bit strange, Scriabin, but I still admire his music”,
recalled Rubinstein, who didn’t seem to mind about the bill.
Although Scriabin seemed very exciting at the beginning of the
twentieth century, he might have been totally forgotten were it not for
the efforts of Vladimir Horowitz.
Horowitz, who couldn’t get over having met him as a child and
being told by the great man that it was more important to go to
museums and read than to practice, made a big effort to keep his music
alive.
“You will always be a pianist,” was the astute judgment of the
otherwise odd Scriabin, when the 12 year-old boy played for him.
“Don’t worry about it; learn all the rest about life and culture instead.”
The new expert can stun people with some of this.
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SERGEI RACHMANINOFF
(1873-1943)
Now
we come to Sergei Rachmaninoff, certainly a Great
Composer, whom even established experts secretly adore, though they
are embarrassed to admit it. Although he
lived until 1943, dying rather incongruously
in Beverly Hills, California, Rachmaninoff
is absolutely not thought of as a “Modern
Composer”.
This made it hard on critics to know
what to say, and it took time and huge
audiences to make his music clear to them.
His music is so beautiful it confused
them for a very long time, especially when it
was used in films – notably Brief Encounter.
Was it, they asked themselves, really movie music?
Now they have largely got over it, but it is still a problem, and even if
you never miss a performance of any of his fabulous works for piano and
orchestra it is really better not to say so.
As for the anecdotes, it is good to know that Rachmaninoff was of good
family; he studied with the composer Glazunov, who was for many years
director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory; he then studied at the
Moscow Conservatory, and, finally, he was mentored by Tchaikovsky.
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More importantly, however, you must know that he composed and
published very successfully before he was twenty, and before he was able
to ask for royalties – copyright then non-existent.
All experts know also that he went through a period of terrible
depression when the premiere of his first symphony was a disaster;
Glazunov, who was conducting, was drunk – this was not unusual – and
the performance was a shambles. Rachmaninoff was so upset he shelved
the work, and it was not discovered till after his death, fifty years later.
As a result of this shattering failure, Rachmaninoff felt he could
no longer compose. In consequence of his breakdown he did something
very new at the time: he consulted a psychoanalyst.
This was Dr. Nicolai Dahl (have you ever noticed how many
Russians are called Nicolai? – however, Dr. Dahl was in fact
a Swedish import to Moscow, a practitioner of the new Freudian
technique of hypnotherapy). Dahl treated Rachmaninoff with hypnosis,
repeating over and over, “You will compose again; you will write
a piano concerto; you will compose with great facility.”
It worked! He did! The piece was the Second Piano Concerto,
probably the most loved work for piano and orchestra in the repertoire.
The dedication of the concerto is ‘To Nicholas Dahl’.
He made a happy marriage and left Russia as soon as he could after the
Revolution. He was celebrated, grew quite rich and was much admired.
For the rest of his life he lived in Switzerland, New York and
California, feeling homesick.
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Rachmaninoff’s tall, gaunt figure was rather like that of Abraham
Lincoln – taller than everyone else, thin and shy. He was unsmiling
in public to the point of apparent severity. Stravinsky called him
“a six-foot scowl.”
But in private, with intimate friends, like the great basso Chaliapin
and the young Horowitz, he would laugh to the point of tears with
stories of Russia and Russians, and he had a fondness for
‘Jewish jokes’.
He was loved everywhere and recognized universally as the greatest
pianist of the century as the public knew that a soft heart lurked
beneath the austere appearance. His concerts at Carnegie Hall
through the 1920’s and 30’s were always sell-outs (at $2.50 a ticket).
Here’s an example that shows his personality: living in California
not far from Stravinsky in 1942, they both had children who were
caught in war-time France. He wrote to a mutual friend:
“I am eager to meet someone whose family, like mine, is over there,
and with whom I could discuss ways to send money and other things.
“As I know how much Igor Fyodorovich has always disliked
my compositions, even though he respects me as a pianist, and he
must know my attitude to modern music, I’m not sure whether I could
invite him and his wife to my house – which I’d love to do – because
I don’t know how he would receive my invitation. Would you be
so kind as to send out a feeler to gauge his reaction to such an idea?”
Stravinsky was of course delighted to accept.
181
Here, we must remind you of Paganini and his Caprice #24
that you got to know with Liszt and Brahms:
In his later years, Rachmaninoff found it increasingly difficult to
come up with themes as beautiful as those he composed when young.
Looking around for a subject for yet another work for piano
and orchestra – these being his specialty – he took up this theme.
The result is the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, which
comes very near to being as popular as his Second Piano Concerto.
Always remember to make reference to those earlier works by
Liszt and Brahms when this is played. This is a musical insider’s
piece of knowledge that you will look good knowing.
You will remember that we said earlier that he had not understood
about royalties as a young man. He had in fact been famous as a
composer since the age of twenty, when one little piano piece became
popular all over the world – the Prelude in C sharp minor.
Everyone loved this piece. Had he received even the smallest
royalty he would have been a rich man very young, and what is more,
he was asked to play it everywhere he went for the rest of his life.
He called the Prelude “It” and came to dread being called upon to play
“It” when audiences clamoured to hear the piece at every concert.
He claimed he preferred to hear the dance band version popular in the
1920’s and 30’s, especially when performed by “that fine pianist”
Eddie Duchin.
He went on being homesick and died of smoking.
182
NICOLAI MEDTNER
(1880-1951)
Medtner is not nearly as well known, or known at all, but he
had an early career similar to that of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev,
i.e. he was a brilliant pianist who turned to composition.
In Medtner’s case, however, it is music we hardly ever hear,
and he can only just be considered an Important Composer. However,
his name does crop up on piano recital programmes from time to time,
and he was very much in the circle of Rachmaninoff and the other
pianistic giants of that era.
He
ended
by
abandoning
the
career
of
concert
pianist,
but nevertheless wrote music that consistently involved the piano,
including three piano concertos.
Like Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, Medtner left Russia for
the United States. Unlike them, however, he found, in the end, that
he was more comfortable in the old world and moved to England,
where he lived out the last part of his life.
Medtner’s personal life was a bit unique: while his brother was
interned in a work camp in Germany, Medtner fell in love with his
sister-in-law. The brother must have been generous and forgiving (and,
of course, absent) – he sent word she was free to go, and they were
subsequently married.
Very Russian.
183
Eastern European 20thcentury Composers
BÉLA BARTÓK
(1881-1945)
Another composer of that generation, Bartók shared a number of
characteristics with his contemporaries: he was a first rate pianist
(coming second to Wilhelm Backhaus in the Anton Rubinstein
Competition in Paris in 1905); he brought folk music and pungent
rhythms to his music; he strongly advocated Nationalism in music,
and he went to America – in his case to avoid the Fascists.
It is largely due to Bartók and his efforts to record folk music from
Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire,
that the term “ethnomusicology” was coined.
This is a great word for experts to know.
From 1905 till the First World War, Bartók traveled around with
a phonograph, often together with his friend Zoltán Kodály,
recording 6,000 examples of folk music of a type then unknown,
though it had been there in the countryside all along.
You can really impress people with knowledge of folk music.
Most people think folk music is rather jolly, whereas some of this
Eastern European music has a strange, twangy, rather sour sound
due to its use of ancient modes. You won’t need to explain what
“modes” are as no one really wants to know.
184
Bartók also liked to use irregular rhythms, which imitate the
rhythms of speech. He put these into his compositions too.
Sadly, when he went to America in the 1940’s, he felt himself to be
in “a wild, free, savage in a cold, hostile land.” (This was not at all
the way all those other Hungarians felt – but they were conductors,
and perhaps that made a difference.)
Now that you know who Koussevitzky is, we will add that it was he
who came to Bartók’s rescue when the composer was living very
frugally in a small apartment on 57th street. Koussevitzky arranged a
commission from the Boston Symphony for ‘Concerto for Orchestra’.
(Note: this is not really a ‘concerto’ at all but a five-movement
symphony that makes a point of featuring individual instruments from
all over the orchestra.)
Two years later, in 1945, as he lay dying, Bartók raced around the
clock to finish his Third Piano Concerto by inventing a system of
notational shorthand, reducing whole chords to single strokes. This is
one of his best works, one where the aggressiveness of his earlier
music is softened by his genuine love of the folk sounds of his country.
As an expert you must have seen his opera Bluebeard’s Castle
at least once. This was written as a wedding present for his second
wife – which seems an odd choice of subject under the circumstances.
This opera was a statement of “spiritual isolationism” that he fell into
through a series of agnostic misadventures. It was originally hated and
banned. A strange piece, it was beautifully recorded by Jesse Norman.
185
All ballet goers have seen his equally strange and gruesome ballet
The Miraculous Mandarin, which centers on a prostitute and some
murderers.
Although one almost only hears the Concerto for Orchestra these
days, it is still considered elegant to admire Bartók’s piano and violin
concertos and many short pieces for piano.
ZOLTÁN KODÁLY
(1882-1967)
A
close friend and associate of Bartók, Kodály was another
Hungarian composer of this same generation.
Before the First World War, Kodaly went along with Bartók
on some of his trips around Transylvania with the phonograph and
manuscript paper, as we explained above; he also composed using
the kind of folkloric material they found in the countryside.
The Háry Janos Suite, which is about a teller of tall tales, is the
most often heard of his works; it begins with a giant orchestral sneeze,
which in Hungary means you don’t have to believe any of it.
Finally, when the subject of Kodály comes up, the expert should
look knowing and say he particularly favors the Psalmus Hungaricus,
which he based on sixteenth century texts and wrote in 1923
to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest.
Very few people you meet will know anything about this.
186
LEOŠ JANÁCEK
(1854-1928)
The Czech composer Janácek composed chiefly opera and choral
works that aren’t done that often, but the expert can look serious and
explain that Janácek’s music ‘grew out of the inflections of Moravian
peasant speech’.
If you are still on the subject of the inflections of Moravian peasant
speech, bring out your taste for the ‘Glagolithic Mass’ – now there’s a
conversation stopper.
This will mark you as a great expert even if you have never been to
see his Jenŭfa – which concerns infanticide in a rural village, or his
From the House of the Dead.
With all that, however, we have to say that Janácek’s handful of
piano works sound haunting and are well written – they are ‘pianistic’.
BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ
(1890-1959)
Martinů,
a Czech, who also came to the United States, is
mentioned more often than his music is heard.
He was very prolific, however, writing six symphonies and
fourteen ballets, none of which you are likely to see or hear performed.
187
On those occasions when you do hear a work by Martinů, though,
you must be very careful to say very little. He went through so many
musical forms it is easy to say something foolish. He tried
expressionism, constructionism, jazz, neo-classicalism, Moravian folk
melodies and just plain music.
(Note: the ‘u’ at the end of his name should have a tiny circle
over it, but this is beyond most printers).
Music in England and America
The British came to music slowly.
Up until the latter half of the 19th century they had to rely wholly
on German imports. Their last great composer was Purcell, who died in
1695!
As we pointed out earlier, they adored Handel, Haydn and
Mendelssohn.
However, finally they were rather relieved and grateful for the
emergence of:
188
EDWARD ELGAR
(1857-1934)
In
said,
fact, Sir Thomas Beecham
“Until
Elgar
came
along,
music was generally supposed to be
as sparse as the sun in England.”
To his distress, Elgar became
best known for his stirring Pomp and
Circumstance marches, which were
heard a great deal during the Great
War. This saddened him as the war
grieved him terribly, no doubt because his musical culture, like
so many at that time, had come from Germany and Austria.
However, the serious expert doesn’t mention these, and will have to
say which recording they prefer of the Cello Concerto (it is safe to say
the Jaqueline du Pré version).
As well as being admired for the Cello Concerto, Elgar is admired
for a work called The Enigma Variations, a work which describes
a group of his friends – this was his first big success – and also for
The Dream of Gerontius. Based on a poem by Cardinal John Newman,
The Dream of Gerontius is really an oratorio, which as we now know
is an English specialty. It is composed for orchestra, soloists and
chorus and describes the journey of a soul from death to judgment.
There is nothing else quite like this.
189
You could say that Elgar was the English Brahms: his music is
masterful, tasteful, dignified and noble, but perhaps not everyone
would understand quite what you meant.
Largely self-taught in music, Elgar had none of the advantages
(or disadvantages) of an expensive education; he drifted around in
minor musical circles in the English countryside until he was
taken over by a masterful wife, Alice Roberts, who organized him,
advised him, copied out all his music, and made him go to London.
(Alice was eight years older than Elgar; have you noticed
how many of these musicians became attached to women older
than themselves? We do not know what this means exactly, but it is
an interesting fact to bring up).
His success dates from this period. When Alice died after thirty
years of a happy, productive marriage, Elgar lost the will to compose.
Elgar was extremely handsome in the English style, and well liked,
but he was Roman Catholic, which made him seem a bit of an outsider.
He died of English medicine.
GUSTAV HOLST
(1874-1934)
Holst is principally known for The Planets, which by now the new
expert will realize is a Tone Poem, since this familiar symphonic work
describes them.
190
The most recognizable part of this is Mars, which is exciting and
very effective. (Note: Holst’s very un-English sounding name is due to
the fact that although his mother was English his father was Swedish –
nevertheless, he definitely counts as an English composer).
Be that as it may, The Planets is about the only work of his that
anyone has ever heard of, although like everyone at that time,
he was interested in finding folk music.
In addition to this, for some years prior to the First World War
Holst had a ‘Sanskrit Period’ during which he composed opera and
choral works based on Hindu literature – there was a big vogue for
things Indian in English artistic circles around that time. This is just
a fact for the expert to know – you are not going to be asked to hear
any of these.
The rest of the time he was a teacher at a girls’ school and college.
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
(1872-1958)
Vaughan Williams has already been described in the chapter on
Nationalism in Music. There we explained how he, like his friend
Holst, sought after English folk music, but how he only found
Greensleeves and borrowed the Theme from Thomas Tallis. We explained
how he edited the Anglican Hymnal and, as we said, he found some there,
but they were neither strange nor rhythmic. We also explained about
his symphonies (nine, of course) based on geographical ideas.
191
Aside from editing the hymnal, he was basically a church musician.
However, despite being a quiet, unassuming man, he went to Paris
in his thirties, which must have seemed rather a daring, if not
a naughty, thing to do, and there he studied with Ravel, although Ravel
was three years his junior. Like Ravel, he loved cats.
Vaughan-Williams loved choral music, like all the English do, and
he conducted that kind of thing at a festival he founded near his home
at Dorking, in Surrey. You can’t be more English than that.
At eighty he married his secretary, Ursula. When he was eighty-six,
and Sir Thomas Beecham was recording his symphonies in London,
Ursula phoned through one morning to say that she was terribly sorry
but her husband wouldn’t be coming in to the session that day, as
he had died.
And that is very English too.
WILLIAM WALTON
(1902-1983)
Walton
is perhaps best known for his wartime film scores,
such as those to Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, and Spitfire.
But he was a big success in America, as well as England,
well before those. His oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, of 1931, was
the rival of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius for best English oratorio since
Handel – not that that was hard, there having been next to no music
by English composers for almost two centuries.
192
During the 1920s Walton lived with the Sitwells, a well-known
literary family – having become friendly with them at Oxford.
You will see that this is in the tradition we pointed out earlier of
musicians living with their friends.
In 1926 he composed Façade. This was a theatre-piece for
seven instruments – a musical setting for a series of twenty-one
abstract, absurdist poems written by Edith Sitwell.
The performances, in a small London theatre, with Edith’s
disembodied voice reading the poems over a loudspeaker, was a huge
success. Later, this fun theater piece gained a new life as a popular
ballet for The Royal Ballet.
Walton’s viola concerto, also premiered in 1931, was likewise
a great success, and as a result, Jascha Heifetz commissioned a
violin concerto from him.
The premiere of this work was scheduled with Heifetz and the
Cleveland Orchestra for Dec. 7th, 1939. Walton was due to attend,
but didn’t show up – war had been declared and he had immediately
enlisted in the British army.
Unlike Holst and Vaughan Williams, Walton’s music was not
influenced by folk music at all, nor did he pay any heed to the various
twentieth century formulas that developed, from polytonality to
serialism. As a result, his well-crafted scores sound – more often than
not – like film scores. This is not all surprising as he wrote those too,
as noted above.
193
After the war, Walton married a young Argentinian who adored
him. They spent the last thirty years of his life living on Ischia,
where he composed very little, making only the occasional trip back to
London for the receipt of some honour or other.
Then, in 1956, Gregor Piatigorsky commissioned a cello concerto
from him. When asked if he would accept, Walton replied,
“I’m a professional composer: I’ll write anything for anybody
if he pays me” – adding with a twinkle, “I write much better
when they pay me in dollars.”
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
(1913-1976)
The British are especially proud of Britten, as he made a big
success early on, and everyone likes prodigies!
Britten became in turn a Radical in politics, a Pacifist and
Conscientious Objector during the war, and later, back in England,
a friend of Soviet composers.
During the early war years, which he spent in the United States, he
shared an apartment in Brooklyn with the English poet W. H. Auden.
It was a hotbed for artists and poets that we would call “liberals”
today. He later moved to Amityville, Long Island.
He returned to England in 1943.
194
He wrote a number of celebrated but extremely depressing operas –
the most famous being his first, Peter Grimes, commissioned by the
Koussevitzky Foundation (where would we be without Koussevitzky?)
as well as lots of songs for his life companion, tenor Peter Pears.
Together they founded the Aldeburgh Festival – which is almost
as smart as Glyndebourne.
For all these reasons it is politically correct to say appreciative
things about the man and his music, whether you like it or not,
in order to show you are open minded.
Shortly before his death Britten was made a Lord – which is
another thing that is very English. This may have been in recognition
of his War Requiem, appropriate enough for a conscientious objector.
He also died of English medicine.
Things
were very active in the United States, meanwhile,
where talent poured in from Europe – which is, after all, cheating,
n’est-ce
pas?
We
will
come
back
to
the
first
generation
American composers, such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin,
but start with a very traditional if unexpected American character:
195
CHARLES IVES
(1874-1954)
Ives composed amusing, slightly crazy, irreverent, music.
He was a New Englander who hated
pomposity, studied at Yale, and composed
for
fun.
He
wrote
works
such
as
Variations on America, Three Places in
New England and the long and complex
Concord Sonata for piano.
Some people take his music seriously
as it gives the impression of dabbling in
the polytonality of the future, but he
would have thought anyone taking his
music this seriously was a real thigh-slapper.
In real life Ives was an executive in an insurance company,
from which he became a very rich man. In this he is probably unique
in the history of music.
We
mentioned earlier the pianist/composer Louis Moreau
Gottschalk, from New Orleans. A child prodigy pianist, Gottschalk
went to Europe, met Chopin and Liszt, created quite a fuss there for
several years, then came back to America to compose and perform.
196
Gottschalk incorporated Creole sounds of the South as well as
Caribbean rhythms into his piano works.
A point to know is that the symphonic reworking of his piano
pieces, A Night in the Tropics, sounds as if it was composed for a
1930’s Fred Astaire film score though it was composed in the 1860’s.
Gottschalk played for soldiers during the Civil War, then toured
South America, where he died in Rio of something he caught –
probably drinking the water.
America also produced a composer called:
EDWARD MacDOWELL
(1860-1908)
Though he did not come from Europe,
MacDowell did his best to sound as if he
had. He worked hard, but his music is
played very little today. He went to Paris
where he was allowed to study at the
Conservatoire, though not a Frenchman.
This must mean something.
He is best known for his Second Piano Concerto, which used to be
very popular, and is still occasionally played.
He wrote quite a bit for the piano and for many years his Woodland
Sketches were popular drawing-room pieces.
197
Piano students were all made to play a saccharine little piece
called To a Wild Rose and its companion piece, To a Water Lily.
These tended to choke off musical enthusiasm in little boys.
In Europe he met Liszt, like everyone else, and played for him,
but we do not know what Liszt concluded.
MacDowell was a gentlemanly man with a nice wife, but his life
was cut tragically short by dementia after being run over by a
hansom cab. This happened in New York, and those who came to
his support at this time included Victor Herbert, Arthur Foote,
George Whitefield Chadwick, Frederick Converse, Andrew Carnegie,
J. P. Morgan and former President Grover Cleveland, which shows
just how much everyone liked this man.
(In his memory his widow founded the MacDowell artist’s colony
in Peterborough, New Hampshire. There, each year, twenty to thirty
aspiring and distinguished artists from several disciplines are given
room and board for four to five weeks in order to work in peace.
So far, six thousand such artists have taken part in these residences,
which is a very nice thing.)
This
leaves
us
with
three
first-generation
Americans
–
Aaron Copland and George Gershwin, both of Jewish background,
who brilliantly incorporated the sounds of America into their music,
and Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian, who created a new genre of
short opera.
198
AARON COPLAND
(1900-1990)
Copland made American
sounds absolutely central to
his music (Appalachian Suite,
Rodeo, etc.), but he actually
learnt his skills in France.
This is an excellent thing
for the expert to know.
Copland was one of those – the first, and best known – who
“studied with Nadia Boulanger” in Paris. We will have quite a bit more
to say about this lady below.
As a boy growing up in Brooklyn Copland had little to go on,
and little encouragement at home. One day in 1920, he saw
an advertisement for an ‘American Academy’ to be started in
Fontainebleau, near Paris, and he thought he would give it a try.
Copland thus was continuing the tradition of Americans who made
the pilgrimage to Europe – and Paris especially – to study composition
or art.
When he returned to America in 1925, Copland tried to compose
symphonies, with a Koussevitzky commission (here’s this man again)
and chamber music, but didn’t really find his niche until Martha
Graham was looking for a score to go with an American ballet.
199
He came up with Appalachian Spring, following on from the earlier
El Salón México, Billy the Kid and Rodeo. With those thoroughly
populist American stage works, Copland became the chairman of the
board of American music.
In keeping with this position, he astutely added a work of
appropriate gravitas, A Lincoln Portrait. However, the only work by
Copland one hears often nowadays is Appalachian Spring. His most
ambitious work, the Symphony No. 3 (sponsored by the Koussevitzky
Foundation, of course), was dubbed by the critic of the Boston Post
‘Shostakovich in the Appalachians’.
From his first trip to Mexico in 1932, with a couple of concerts
devoted to his works, Copland wrote to his colleague Virgil Thomson,
“I begin to feel as famous as Gershwin!”
GEORGE GERSHWIN
(1898-1937)
Gershwin
also went to Paris, and wanted to study with Nadia
Boulanger. She didn’t think him “serious enough,” and rejected him as a
student. That was all right because he was befriended by Ravel instead.
Gershwin, like Copland, was also to excel at making American sounds
central to his music as we hear in his jazz, in An American in Paris and in
Porgy and Bess, America’s great opera.
200
He really didn’t need any cultural stimuli or context, though the
publicity that came with them made him a rich and famous man; whatever
he did turned to gold: Broadway, Carnegie Hall, opera – the melodies
he produced in all these fields were gems.
Gershwin became a Carnegie Hall
composer
when
Walter
Damrosch
introduced his Piano Concerto in F in
1925 with the New York Philharmonic,
then, in 1928, An American in Paris,
which you will now be able to identify
as a Tone Poem. Koussevitzky (here he
is
again)
thought
him
a
genius,
introducing Second Rhapsody with the
Boston Symphony. Toscanini tried his
baton at Rhapsody in Blue with pianist
Earl Wild, but the result lacked Gershwin’s own sparkle by a long shot.
With all his success he was modest, and would constantly seek advice
from acknowledged masters of composition. Besides Boulanger and
Ravel, he consulted the most unexpected “modern” masters of music
theory and practice – from Stravinsky to Alban Berg to Arnold Schönberg.
In the California of the 1930s, Schönberg became his good friend and
neighbour and, like Ravel, declined to teach him; he just wanted to play
tennis with him. One good anecdote concerns Schönberg’s immensely
complex, twelve-tone, long and heavy-going String Quartet No. 2 which
was premiered one night at a private house concert in Hollywood.
201
The next day, on the tennis court, Gershwin told Schönberg he had
been inspired to want to write a string quartet himself – “but something
simple – like Mozart.” Schönberg was not amused, responding awkwardly
that “times were different then.”
For the expert there are a few things to be familiar with at this
point; one is a name we have just mentioned and which you must know
when to drop: Nadia Boulanger.
Almost all recent composers studied in Paris with this legendary
figure at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau and the
École Normale de Musique in Paris.
We say ‘legendary’ because so many Americans claim to have
studied with this exacting French lady that she has become nearly
mythical, and were she to have actually taught anything to all who
place her name in their biography, she would have had to live
well beyond her actual lifetime (1887 – 1979).
Boulanger was a teacher of composition and the elder sister and teacher
of an even more talented musician, Lili Boulanger, a very promising
composer who died tragically young at twenty-four, and who –
you guessed it – won the Rome Prize while still a student. After Lili’s
death, her big sister continued to carry the torch.
An American musicologist, Lisa Cook, has compiled a list of all the
American composers who studied with Nadia Boulanger. It is a very,
very, very long list, which even includes present-day names such as
Philip Glass and Elliott Carter.
202
Madame Boulanger (she was very prim and always insisted on
the formalities) might not have claimed responsibility for all of them.
It explains why the composer and critic Virgil Thomson said,
“Every town in the USA had a Five and Dime Store and someone who
studied with Nadia Boulanger.”
The high level of talent in these two sisters may perhaps
be explained by the fact that their mother was Russian.
GIAN CARLO MENOTTI
(1911 – 2006)
Menotti,
a generous and clever
man, created brilliant short operas,
such as The Medium, The Telephone,
The Consul and Amelia Goes to the Ball.
He
also
founded
the
celebrated
festival at Spoleto, but he was not really
very American, though his career was
mainly based in America. He was Italian – very Italian.
Menotti came to America to study at the Curtis Institute.
While still practically a student, he was taken up by none other than
Arturo Toscanini, and a lot of expectation was heaped on his young
shoulders: he was widely expected to be the last great hope for opera.
203
Menotti’s friend and companion, Samuel Barber, was from an old
New England family.
A good piece of trivia to know is that his aunt was the great
American star of the Met, Louise Homer, a frequent partner of Caruso,
and young Samuel grew up listening to his aunt singing traditional
American songs on the porch.
Barber is known almost exclusively for his Adagio for Strings,
which was composed when he was a student; it is the slow movement
of a string quartet and it quite rightly became famous when it was
played by full string orchestra and conducted by Toscanini.
But he is also known for a very problematic opera called Vanessa.
This opera is musically very hard on the would-be expert.
The plot, written by his friend Menotti, opens with Vanessa refusing
to show her face until her old beau – returned after some years –
says he loves her. He does, but when she shows her face, it was not
him after all. It goes on from there.
Like Tchaikovsky, Barber suffered from depression.
Now we come, unavoidably, to:
204
Modern Music
This rather childish term reflects the disorder that attacks the minds
and vocabulary of those confronted by dissonant sounds, music without
discernable themes, or still more: that which you must learn to call
“Twelve Tone” harmony or “serial music”.
None of this is “modern” at all – most of this is approaching its
100th anniversary.
These sounds are called “modern” because very little of the music
that is actually performed has been composed since the time during
which these sounds were first introduced, about a century ago.
Because of this it still ranks as “new”. You will hear people say,
“I just don’t ‘get’ modern music”,
or words to that effect, and they
are usually referring to music
that was composed around the time
of the First World War.
Just as Debussy and Ravel have
been compared to the Impressionist
painters, the Modern Composers
can be compared to Picasso and the
abstract painters since that time.
There is truth in this.
205
However, it is also true that the human nervous system can tolerate
clashing lines and colours more easily than clashing sounds and
rhythms.
They are referring to composers like Arnold Schönberg, Paul
Hindemith, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Elliott Carter, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, and even to parts of poor old Stravinsky.
The fact is, until very recently you could not possibly admit
you didn’t like these sounds.
To get back to ‘modern music’: the original protagonists of
these sounds have had many imitators – so many of them! Can it be
that it is easier to imitate these seemingly disconnected sounds than
to write a jolly good tune?
Pierre Boulez was one of these, even though he was born in France
rather than Germany like most of the others. Boulez tried twelve tone
and “total serialization”; he composed works with names such as
Le marteau sans maître, which means “the hammer totally out of
control”, and that describes it perfectly. It’s a moot point if it qualifies
as a Tone Poem.
So you see, in using the term ‘modern’, the experts are not referring
to George Gershwin and certainly not to Rachmaninoff, both of whom
composed quite recently, and whose music sounds normal and
invariably sells tickets, as we have pointed out.
The new expert must have something to say about all this.
206
The proper thing to say about “modern music” is that it was
a reaction to 19th century Romanticism – to the themes, melody and
harmonies of that century.
This is expert jargon, but it is also quite true.
You will hear very serious people say that music made up entirely
of random notes, unexpected rhythms and a wide range of squeaks and
whistles, is refreshing – or better still, “interesting”, or “stimulating”.
They might say it is “piquant”, or “creative”, or “thought
provoking” (you will never hear them say it is beautiful).
Don’t argue with them. And don’t worry, you won’t actually hear
very much of this music performed, and you can always use one of
those above adjectives if forced to be polite.
You absolutely must not say anything critical about any of this.
To say something negative out loud would be almost as bad as saying
your favourite composer is Rachmaninoff.
Modern music was born out of late 19th century Germany and
they had a lot of problems to work through, to put it mildly.
For one thing, they had just spent half a century adoring Wagner;
they also had produced Wagner’s acolyte, Bruckner, as well as Mahler.
These composers had never heard the saying that “brevity is the
soul of wit.”
If you had to listen to half a century of these enormous, rich,
romantic, endless works you would have invented “modern music” too.
207
Some of the imitators of the original “modern composers” compose
music that sounds like the jungle at night, some like angry cats, some
repeat the same set of notes over and over and over and over – this is
either because they didn’t think you got it the first ten times, or
because they assume you will go to sleep anyway.
Do not point out to anyone that it is easier to compose this sort of
thing than to compose music of the simplicity, complexity, beauty,
meaning or charm of Chopin or Mozart.
For some reason, while you are considered obliged to sound like
an appreciative expert on the early 20th century modern composers,
you are under far less obligation to say you have ever listened to
the newest contemporary efforts – or to like them at all.
At least, not to the same extent that you are expected to submit
to the fellows who invented “twelve-tone” harmony, abolished themes
and functionally audible harmonies early in the twentieth century.
The established experts refer to standard harmonic laws we all
can hear and understand as “common practice”, as if it was something
to be discarded.
Don’t allow yourself to be intimidated. When this happens
you can look sadder and wiser and say your favourite composer was
the unknown tutor to Boccherini in the 18th century.
This will take care of the matter and establish you as a supreme
expert.
208
There is one aspect to contemporary “modern music” which is
quite encouraging.
Much, if not most, of this music is programmed because of
underwriting from various kinds of trusts, established so that
“young composers” can have their works premiered. The symphony
orchestras are grateful for the money, and these pieces are usually
heard only once, and no one ever remembers anything about them.
If you are expected to sound really knowledgeable, you should
point out that contemporary composers are chiefly to be found in
acadaemia, where technicalities can be interesting to the professors
who have salaries, tenure and retirement benefits – they do not have to
starve or live with friends, as did most of the Great Composers.
After all, the great composers were forced to come up with music
that communicated something ennobling or charming to their patrons,
their friends and the listening public.
Postscript
One more word of caution to the new expert:
209
Chamber Music!! What is this??
Faced with a first experience of Chamber Music, the new expert
may just give up.
The grand sweep of a full orchestra or the fabulous dexterity of
a virtuoso pianist is one thing, but what is this? Four chubby
middle-aged men huddled over their strings scrubbing away, and an
audience of solemn auditors, who listen with the kind of awe normally
reserved for religious occasions.
You are right to be perplexed.
Because what you need to understand is that this kind of music is
not some kind of strange rite for the initiated.
Indeed, the whole thing is a misunderstanding: it was never meant
to be listened to – it was meant to be played.
Composers created this music for home consumption, for an
evening among fellow musicians, not for show or for a recital hall –
it was for a few intimate friends on a winter night.
210
Even archdukes in the Vienna of 1800 commissioned these
works of composers like Beethoven to play with their cronies.
Count Rasumovsky, the Russian ambassador in Vienna, commissioned
three of Beethoven’s most famous string quartets for this very purpose.
Concert halls were still rare and a thing of the future.
In the evenings, princes and paupers, musicians and amateurs,
fathers and sons, foursomes or fivesomes, would sit around together
reading through music and experiencing the clever cross-weavings of
themes and rhythms. Sometimes Nanny or an eldest sister would play
a part for piano.
They did this for fun!
We are used to this relegating of simple pleasures to professionals
in the world of sports: those who might be out taking a walk or
playing ball in the street with their children sit goggle-eyed watching
gladiatorial combatants inflated beyond normal human dimensions by
steroids and padded costumes – combatants who make millions a year
playing in their stead.
Everyday wit – that used to create home limericks for all occasions,
clever toasts and lively dinner conversation – has disappeared,
having been turned over to late night comedians.
Perhaps by the same token we are drifting toward a situation
where rather than normal people playing cards there will be only
professionals doing so in front of a reverent audience. This has
long since already happened to chess.
211
That chamber music was a form of home entertainment, like doing
a jigsaw, may help the new expert understand what is going on here –
he might even think it looks like fun and wish he had learnt an
instrument himself.
This brings us to the basic tenet of this book:
Music is not a business; music is not an academic subject;
music is not a spectator sport. Music is the natural response to
higher feelings that make you want to dance and sing.
And so we come to the:
212
Conclusion
It is hard to say what will happen now, but the sad state of
good music today is yet another rich topic of conversation for
the would-be expert.
One sign of hope for good music is that the internet has knocked
a hole in the profitability of pulp pop music so this tidal wave of
junk sound may die away, leaving us with our native instinct to turn to
music for the expression of the higher thoughts and feelings mentioned
above, with beauty of line and richness of harmony.
If, that is, these higher thoughts and feelings can first be retrieved
from the re-cycle bin.
Perhaps we should give Shakespeare the last word on the subject.
He puts these words into the mouth of Lorenzo in Act V, Scene 1 of
The Merchant of Venice:
“The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved
with sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night and his affections
dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted! Mark the music!”
213
Is this
The End of Music?
214
No, just of
A Funny Thing Happened
on the Way to Carnegie Hall
215
Juliette
de Marcellus is a musician, teacher, writer, lecturer and
a prize-winning journalist who was named best music critic of the SouthEastern sector of the United States by the Chicago Times several times.
She has contributed to Opera News and other magazines from Palm Beach
to London to the Edinburgh Festival.
Juliette lectures at The Society of
the Four Arts in Palm Beach on How to
Listen to Classical Music, as well as
The Legacy of French Culture.
She wrote Rose and Henri, an absorbing
account of the dual culture of her parents
– French aristocratic and Edwardian
English – and their life in America,
and edited, translated and published
The Atlas of Man, the unique
anthropological masterwork of her father
Count Henri de Marcellus.
Juliette has collaborated with a
number of distinguished musicians.
She was co-creator, with the Swedish
composer and conductor Ulf Bjőrlin, of the symphonic narrative
The Snow Queen. She also created a unique narrative version of
Prokofiev’s Lt. Kije Suite at the request of Neeme Järvi, chief conductor of
the Detroit Symphony. She was a friend and associate of the conductors
Paul Csonka and Anton Guadagno, and the composer Gian Carlo Menotti.
Juliette co-produced Schubertiades at Sotheby’s with the pianist
Alan Kogosowski. She also collaborated with Kogosowski on the
narrative script of his television series Chopin, A Life to Remember,
which is available on DVD, and was also instrumental, with Menotti,
in encouraging Kogosowski to produce his acclaimed orchestration of
Rachmaninoff’s Trio Elégiaque, thereby creating the Concerto Elégiaque,
the recording of which, on Chandos, is an international best-seller.
Juliette’s comprehensive knowledge of the musical world has given her
a sharp and incisive insight into its attitudes, practices, foibles and
preconceptions, as well as the joy and uplifting spiritual qualities which
have made it one of the highest of human pursuits since time began.
She is not jaded, as someone might have a right to be, who has seen
musicians from Beecham, Bernstein and Rubinstein to Pavarotti, Perlman
and all the latest competition winners, come and go, together with their
entourages of press agents and managers.
Juliette’s all-embracing knowledge of music and the music world is
always succinctly and wittily expressed, according laymen the same
respect and empathy as professionals and invariably enhancing everyone’s
understanding and enjoyment of this profound and affecting yet quirky and
often amusing world.
Suggested further reading:
For those of you who enjoyed the central
chapters of this book, the author recommends
Genius of the Piano, an in-depth look
at the life, times and accomplishment, of the
greatest composer for the piano, Frederic
Chopin, with comprehensive detours to his
friends Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz, and many
of the other great composers covered lightly
in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
Carnegie Hall.
Available from www.kogosowski.com
N
www.juliettedemarcellus.com